Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has no intention of resigning from her position so that Vice President Kamala Harris or a younger judicial liberal can take it, Sotomayor says she intends to stay on the high court until her retirement, according to The Wall Street Journal.
“This is no time to lose her important voice on the court. She just turned 70 and takes better care of herself than anyone I know,” said an anonymous source to The Journal. Liberals on the court are now outnumbered by fiscal and social conservatives and managed to overturn Roe V. Wade, handing abortion rights back to the states to decide.
“This would probably be a good day for Sotomayor to retire,” wrote David Dayen, executive editor of the liberal American Prospect magazine.
The Journal notes how liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg resisted calls for her to resign before she died at age 87. Her death allowed then-President Donald Trump to affirm the court’s conservative majority by appointing Justice Amy Coney Barrett shortly before Democrats won the presidency and the Senate and the White House.
But liberal Democrats want Sotomayor out now. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, called on Ginsburg to retire during the Obama presidency, with a March 2014 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, saying that the times are different now.
“It is far more uncertain that the Democrats could confirm a successor than in summer 2014,” he told The Journal. “And Sotomayor is 70,” while Ginsburg was 81 when he urged her to step down.
