Alito: ‘Obviously I’m Here for Another Term’

Alito: ‘Obviously I’m Here for Another Term’

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is putting retirement speculation to rest, making clear that he plans to remain on the Court for another term despite pressure from some conservatives to step aside while Republicans control the White House and Senate.

“Obviously I’m here for another term,” Alito, 76, told the Wall Street Journal during a rare interview from his Supreme Court chambers, meaning the 2026 term beginning in October and running through June 2027.

The speculation surrounding Alito’s future got a major, and accidental, boost at the end of the Court’s term in June when NPR incorrectly reported that he was retiring.

NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg had been leaving the Court as Chief Justice John Roberts announced upcoming staff retirements. After asking a bystander what was happening, Totenberg heard “retirement announcements” as a singular “announcement” and assumed, without confirming with anyone inside the courtroom, that it was Alito stepping down. NPR’s executive editor, trusting Totenberg’s decades of credibility, immediately surfaced the outlet’s prewritten retirement story and published it. The false report also went out on air.

The story lasted online for roughly five minutes before it was pulled. Totenberg later acknowledged the error and apologized to Alito personally.

“It was the worst professional mistake of my more than 50 years in journalism,” Totenberg said afterward. “It was a rookie mistake.”

NPR‘s own public editor was more blunt: had a junior reporter made the same error, publishing a major story based on an unverified secondhand remark from an unidentified bystander, they likely would have been fired for it.

The mistake nevertheless fueled speculation that Alito might be preparing to leave the Court. Some conservatives have also encouraged him to retire while President Donald Trump has the opportunity to nominate a younger successor, particularly with control of the Senate potentially at stake in November. 

Alito does not sound particularly impressed with the campaign.

“It’s not pleasant, in the sense that it’s a reminder of mortality,” Alito said. “It’s like, what are those vultures doing up there? They are flying around. But it goes with life tenure.” 

He also pushed back substantively on the interchangeability argument, the idea popular in some conservative circles that any Federalist Society-vetted replacement would be functionally equivalent to Alito and that he therefore owes the movement his seat. Alito rejected that framing, suggesting that commentators who think this way view the Court through the same reductive partisan lens they apply to cable news panels, where a “Republican strategist” and a “Democratic strategist” are assumed to be interchangeable representatives of their respective teams.

The interview came ahead of the October release of his book, So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country, and marked the completion of his 20th full term on the Court.

For now, anyone waiting for an actual Alito retirement announcement appears to have considerably more waiting to do.

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