\n<\/p>\n
Samuel Alito, the conservative US supreme court justice, has said \u201cI think I have to\u201d contemplate retiring every year at his age.<\/p>\n
Alito, 76, delivered that comment in a rare interview with CBS News scheduled to air on Monday, a little more than six months after a widely publicized hospital visit invited speculation about his potential retirement.<\/p>\n
In a preview clip circulated online by the network, Alito told Jan Crawford, CBS national correspondent, that \u201cI thought about\u201d retiring at the end of the supreme court term that ended in June, saying: \u201cIt\u2019s something that I think someone at my age has to think about.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut,\u201d Alito continued, \u201cI thought I could still make a valuable contribution \u2013 which is why I became a justice and a judge in the first place. So that was basically it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Crawford then said: \u201cSo you\u2019ll be considering this probably every year \u2013 rethinking it.\u201d And Alito replied: \u201cYeah, I think I have to.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked whether he was unduly undermining Republicans\u2019 wish to confirm a conservative replacement at a time when their party controlled the US Senate, Alito rejoined: \u201cIt\u2019s too hard to predict \u2026 how for anybody, and particularly when you reach a certain age, what your situation will be.<\/p>\n
\u201cA year from now, two years from now and so forth \u2013 it\u2019s too hard to predict what the political situation will be and what any president might do with respect to a replacement.\u201d<\/p>\n
Crawford\u2019s conversation with Alito came after he became sick at a Federalist Society dinner in Philadelphia on 20 March and was brought to a hospital. A supreme court spokesperson later said that Alito was treated for dehydration; returned to his Virginia home that night, as had been previously planned; and returned to work by 23 March.<\/p>\n
Nonetheless, news of the hospital trip prompted commentary across the political spectrum about whether Alito \u2013 who secured his supreme court appointment during George W Bush\u2019s presidency in 2006 \u2013 may retire.<\/p>\n
Much of it centered on the possibility that his retirement would give Donald Trump the chance to appoint a fourth justice to the nine-member court, in all likelihood someone both younger and equally or more conservative than Alito.<\/p>\n
Progressive groups have also been girding themselves for the possibility that Alito\u2019s fellow conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, 78, could retire while Trump is in office.<\/p>\n
Trump appointed three justices during the first of his two presidencies: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. They established a conservative supreme court supermajority alongside Alito, Thomas and John Roberts that has frequently \u2013 though not always \u2013 ruled in favor of Trump\u2019s administration.<\/p>\n
Alito also spoke to Crawford about how he had endured everything from \u201cthe loss of old friendships\u201d to \u201cphysical threats and harassment\u201d after writing the 2022 majority opinion that struck down the federal right to an abortion created by the Roe v Wade decision nearly 50 years earlier.<\/p>\n
He asserted that overturning Roe v Wade \u2013 a decision disapproved by nearly six in 10 Americans, according to polling by the Pew Research Center \u2013 required \u201ccourage\u201d from him and the four justices who joined his opinion: Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett and Thomas.<\/p>\n
Lost friendships were \u201csomething you have to live with,\u201d Alito said, because it is \u201cpart of the job that you are going to displease people by making decisions on controversial matters\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne side or the other is going to really dislike you because of the decision,\u201d said Alito, who in late September recused himself from a major climate change case amid scrutiny over his stock holdings in oil companies.<\/p>\n
But, the justice said, threats and harassment were \u201cquite disturbing\u201d as well as \u201ca danger for the courts and \u2026 others in public life\u201d.<\/p>\n
Those remarks echoed rare testimony before the US House in July by Barrett and her liberal colleague Elena Kagan as they made the case for upgraded supreme court security, saying a rise in threats had increasingly affected the justices\u2019 personal and family lives. One notable case was the arrest of a would-be assassin near the home of Kavanaugh with weapons and zip ties in 2022 after word leaked that the supreme court would overturn Roe v Wade.<\/p>\n
Alito additionally expressed his belief that \u201cvery harsh criticism\u201d by Trump as well as his presidential successor and predecessor Joe Biden could be \u201cquite damaging\u201d to the supreme court. And he insisted that the supreme court\u2019s job was to interpret the US constitution \u201cas best we can\u201d and apply it to the cases it handles, while rejecting the notion that it had evolved into a political institution.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are not part of any political movement,\u201d said Alito, whose memoir \u2013 titled So Ordered: An Originalist\u2019s View of the Constitution, the Court and Our Country \u2013 was given a Tuesday release date. \u201cAnd we are not attempting to further any political agenda.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Samuel Alito, the conservative US supreme court justice, has said \u201cI think I have to\u201d contemplate retiring every year at his age. Alito, 76, delivered that comment in a rare interview with CBS News scheduled to air on Monday, a little more than six months after a widely publicized hospital visit invited speculation about his<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":52396,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[24883,2389,160,834,1460,2282,222,4313,159],"class_list":{"0":"post-52395","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-alito","9":"tag-conservative","10":"tag-court","11":"tag-hints","12":"tag-interview","13":"tag-justice","14":"tag-retirement","15":"tag-samuel","16":"tag-supreme"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/52396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}