Justice Samuel Alito Not Retiring, “Here for Another Term”
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, author of the landmark 2022 opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade and returned authority over abortion to the states and people, has confirmed he will remain on the high court for another term.
In a rare summertime interview with The Wall Street Journal, the 76-year-old justice said, “Obviously I’m here for another term.”
Alito’s comments come amid speculation that he might step down later this year so President Donald Trump could appoint a successor before the November midterm elections. The justice, a conservative appointed by President George W. Bush, has been the focus of retirement rumors, including a false NPR report on June 30 that the court had announced his departure.
NPR quickly retracted the story, which stemmed from a misheard announcement about staff retirements.
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Some conservatives have publicly urged Alito to retire and “take one for the team,” similar to pressures faced by past justices.
Asked whether such calls bother him, Alito replied: “It’s not pleasant, in the sense that it’s a reminder of mortality. It’s like, what are those vultures doing up there? They are flying around. But it goes with life tenure.”
He also pushed back against the notion that justices are interchangeable with younger replacements.
“Yeah, I think some of those who call for the retirement of judges think that way,” Alito said. “I don’t watch cable news at all anymore, but I assume this is still true. They’d have some … 20-somethings to talk about some important issue, ‘and he is a Democratic strategist and she is a Republican strategist.’ I never knew what that meant. … So yeah, 20-somethings, 30-somethings, particularly if they’re not lawyers, I’m sure that’s how they see the court.”
Alito wrote the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which held that “The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.”
The ruling stated that “Roe and Casey must be overruled” and returned the issue to elected representatives: “The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”
In that opinion, Alito emphasized that the Constitution “makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,” and that any such right must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.”
He described abortion as “a profound moral question” and declared that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences.”
The decision ended nearly 50 years of a pretend right to abortion that resulted in the deaths of more than 66 million unborn children.
By affirming that the Constitution leaves the matter to the states, Alito’s opinion has enabled states to enact stronger protections for unborn life.
