Progressive activists are mounting a pressure campaign to get Justice Sotomayor, and possibly Justice Kagan, to retire from the U.S. Supreme Court, so that Biden can appoint two younger and presumably further left judges.
These folks are thinking back to what happened with Justice Ginsburg and they don’t want to go down that road again.
Politico reports:
What to do about SotomayorBack in 2013, then President BARACK OBAMA quietly met with Supreme Court Justice RUTH BADER GINSBURG to subtly encourage her to retire before Republicans flipped the Senate. She didn’t, and the GOP went on to control the chamber for the following six years.Back in 2021, liberal activists openly campaigned for Justice STEPHEN BREYER to retire, fearful Democrats would similarly lose control of the Senate in the midterm cycle. He did but the party didn’t.Now in 2023, the conversation is starting all over again with 68-year-old Justice SONIA SOTOMAYOR, with a few think pieces and podcast episodes urging her (and sometimes fellow Justice ELENA KAGAN) to step down, and for the White House to nudge them in that direction.But, so far, the main party organs and progressive think tanks aren’t biting.“I certainly understand the argument and think it is fair to ask the question, but we do not plan to mount any campaign on this like we did last year for Breyer,” said BRIAN FALLON, the head of Demand Justice, which hired a billboard truck to drive around the Supreme Court in 2021 urging Breyer to retire. “No judge is above reproach, but as crisis-level situations go, this does not seem as acute as Breyer was, or even as urgent a problem as, say, the Democrats’ ongoing refusal to get rid of blue slips.”
Brian Fallon is the Hillary Clinton 2016 spokesman who went into judicial activism after she lost. He and his group ‘Demand Justice’ are not the only ones pushing for this.
The liberal publication VOX published this article just a few weeks ago:
Sotomayor and Kagan need to think about retiringWe have now lived with the consequences of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s late-life arrogance for more than two years.In 2014, President Barack Obama was in office and Democrats controlled the Senate, empowering them to confirm a new justice if Justice Ginsburg had left the Supreme Court. Ginsburg was a two-time cancer survivor in her 80s, the oldest member of a 5-4 Court where the right to an abortion — and perhaps even the right to vote in reasonably fair elections — teetered on a knife’s edge.When she died in the final months of the Trump presidency, Ginsburg told her granddaughters her last desire: “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.” It amounted to nothing. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court, a seat that until recently belonged to the greatest women’s rights lawyer in American history, is now held by her ideological opposite.Now, eight years later, the question arises: Should Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, 68 and 62, respectively, do what Ginsburg would not?
I suspect that one of the reasons the left is going after Sotomayor is because she has spoken publicly of her friendship with Justice Clarence Thomas, who she describes with great warmth.
Sotomayor and Kagan should tell these activists to pound sand.
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