Democrats hoped Joe Biden could counteract Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominations.
The left is in for a bitter disappointment.
A Supreme Court justice threw Joe Biden a curveball with this retirement decision.
The activist left wants to force liberal Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer to retire.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – among others – pressed the 82-year-old Bill Clinton appointee to step down now while the Democrats control the Senate.
Democrats wants to avoid a repeat of when Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to retire following Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election victory.
That allowed Donald Trump to replace Ginsburg and leave the court with six Republican-appointed justices versus just three liberal appointees.
But Justice Breyer dashed Democrats’ hopes for an early retirement by hiring four new Supreme Court clerks for the 2021-2022 term.
“Justice Stephen Breyer has hired a full complement of four law clerks for the next Supreme Court term, the court confirmed Friday, in a possible signal that he doesn’t have any immediate plans to retire,” Bloomberg reported.
In the past several months Breyer’s dropped hints that he would not retire on the left’s political timetable.
At a speech for a Harvard University lecture series, Justice Breyer warned Americans that the court would lose legitimacy if the public viewed justices as servants of the politicians from the political parties that nominated and confirmed them to the bench.
“If the public sees judges as politicians in robes, its confidence in the courts — and in the rule of law itself — can only diminish, diminishing the court’s power, including its power to act as a check on other branches,” Breyer stated.
Breyer also plans to publish a book entitled “The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics” where he doubled down on that theme.
“A judge’s loyalty is to the rule of law,” Breyer explained, and “not the political party that helped to secure his or her appointment.”
Justice Breyer also attacks the left for floating court-packing schemes to cement a new liberal majority on the Supreme Court.
“Proposals have been recently made to increase the number of Supreme Court justices,” Breyer added. “I aim to make those whose reflexive instincts may favor significant structural (or similar institutional) changes, such as forms of court-packing, think long and hard before embodying those changes in law.”
Breyer may also want to stay on the bench for the 2021-2022 term because it promises to be the most consequential in many Americans’ lifetimes.
The court will hear the most direct challenge to Roe v. Wade in a generation as well as a case that could greatly expand the scope of Second Amendment rights.
As the most senior liberal judge,Breyer could author the lead dissents that will lay down a marker for left-wing jurisprudence for a generation if he is on the losing end – as many predict – in both cases.
But Democrats are worried.
Chuck Schumer only has 50 votes in the Senate and can confirm Breyer’s replacement only using Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote.
Liberal activists are terrified that if one Democrat senator experiences a health problem the Republicans would then hold a 50-49 majority.
And everyone in Washington believes Mitch McConnell would hold a Supreme Court seat vacant for all of 2022 to see which party ended up controlling the Senate after the 2022 midterm elections.
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