Actually I would guess that conservative justices will put pressure on him to hang on till a Republican president takes office.
The US system of open-ended terms for SC justices is ridiculous. There should be a single non-renewable term of 12 years or so and probably also a retirement age of around 75. Allowing justices to pick when they retire is a terrible idea since it effectively allows them to pick their successor. And rising life expectancy is going to make things worse. Justices will routinely continue into their 80’s and even 90’s. This will raise the stakes for SC appointment battles since it will be common for justices to stay on for 30-40 years.
At the same time greater ideological polarization will mean that some justices will hang on desperately if their party doesn’t come to power for a while. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next 20 years you get a situation where a clearly unfit justice simply refuses to retire.
And yes speculation about the life expectancy and health of justices, like on this thread, is distasteful but also inevitable given the current appointment system.
No. Sandra Day O’Connor’s distaste for Alito is well-known, she wouldn’t have picked him in a million years.
You might mean that they can influence the choice by putting it into the hands of a President who is most aligned with their ideology, but that’s not the same thing. Also, if you look at the Court starting with Stevens during the Ford Administration, a good number of justices have almost immediately betrayed the ideology of the President that nominated them.
That said, the Court, as with any court, doesn’t like big changes. The retiring justice sensibly wants his replacement to maintain the balance. When it doesn’t happen that way we get the usual wringing of hands about how the court is overturning precedent and how can they do such an evil thing and blah-blah-blah, which is code for “they’re deciding in a way I don’t like”.
Sure that used to happen earlier but I suspect Souter will be the last surprise of that kind for a very long time. Certainly all the six justices since then have been fairly predictable and I doubt future picks will be any different. Today, when a justice retires they have a clear idea of what type of justice will replace them. And probably all of them have a clear party preference as well. O'Connor was perhaps the last justice who wouldn't have minded too much if a President of the other party got to nominate her successor.
If a Democrat wins in 2016, I would not be surprised to see President Obama nominated. There’s precedent, and it fits with his scholarly Constitution qualifications.
This simply shifts vast amounts of power back to the President and the Senate. It reduces the independence and impartiality of the court, which is already heavily open to influence (as this thread indicates.) You want to have these confirmation fights in the Senate more often? Sweet Jesus, no!
I would be amazed if Scalia retires before 2016. Forget about him being in the normal decline for a man of his age. I’m betting he’s filed a living will that says that if his heart stops beating during a Democratic administration he wants to be hooked up to machines until the next Republican is elected.
I think he would take it. He’s a constitutional scholar so he’d be interested in the job. And I don’t think Obama is really looking forward to ending his career at 55.
But the reality is Taft was a fluke. Former presidents no longer go on to active political careers. They’re relegated to “elder statesman” status.
Taft had been a judge for years and years, and had been approached to be a supreme court justice before he was nominated and won the presidency. Obama has never been a judge. How much courtroom experience does Obama even have?
He’d be an insane pick (in a WTF? sense), but not nearly as insane as Harriet Meyers.
OK, but I still can’t see why he would accept. He’d be stuck doing that for basically the rest of his active life. Sure, he taught constitutional law for a few years when he was young, but that doesn’t mean he wants to spend his waning years on the SCOTUS as a junior Justice to Roberts, fetching coffee for Alito and Scalia.
Mainly because it would be the only opportunity he’d have to continue having an active life.
Let’s face it, nobody falls into the Presidency. You have to have an almost insane level of drive and ambition to make it into the Oval Office. And you can’t just shut that off after your term is over. People who run for President want to be powerful and suddenly they’re being told at the peak of their career that they’ll never hold another position of power for the rest of their life - at most, they’ll have “influence”. (And in Obama’s case this will be magnified by the fact he’ll be put into retirement at a relatively early age.)
Supreme Court Justice might not be as good as being President but it’s a position of real power. I think any ex-president would jump on the offer if it was made. Heck, most of them probably would run for Mayor of Mooseport if it came to that.
I’ll say three. I am guessing Ginsberg and Breyer will want Obama to name their successors, and I’ll guess that a third justice retires or dies, setting off a monumental confirmation fight. That should be fun.
I don’t think Obama will ever become a Supreme Court justice. If a Democrat nominated him in the next term it wouldn’t sit right with a lot of people, I think. There’s nothing unconstitutional about it, but it’d be a quick turnaround and Congress and the public might not like it. It also runs counter to one of the recent trends in nominating justices: picking people with short track records that can’t be used against them. That won’t be true of a two-term president. And the other trend is picking younger justices who might stay on the court for 20 or 25 or 30 years. Obama will be 55 when he leaves office. There’s also the fact that presidents want to establish their own identities in office, and we’ve seen that play out over the years with Obama and Clinton.
The point is that confirmation hearings will have lower stakes because of the fixed terms. You are not worried that a justice will sit on the court for 30+ years. The US is the only major democracy I know where SC appointments are so intensely political and contentious.
But he’s not going to get nominated for the SCOTUS. Even if he leaves the Whitehouse as a popular President, there isn’t really any upside for a future President to nominate him.
Quid pro quo, if Obama can get this unknown Democrat elected via early endorsement, vigorous campaigning, and access to his fundraising/networking machine. I’m not saying it’s likely at all, but I could see it happening IF that is something that would interest him.