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Justice Samuel Alito, one of the Supreme Court’s staunchest conservatives, does not plan to retire before the court finishes its upcoming session, he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal published Friday.
“Obviously I’m here for another term,” Alito told James Taranto. He said that calls for him to step down are unpleasant because they’re “a reminder of mortality.”
“It’s like, what are those vultures doing up there? They are flying around,” Alito said. “But it goes with life tenure.”
His comments put to rest, for now, long-running questions about whether the 76-year-old jurist would step down to give President Donald Trump the opportunity to appoint an ideologically similar, yet younger, replacement while the Senate is controlled by Republicans.
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The court’s upcoming session begins in early October and is expected to wrap up in late June.
Alito, an appointee of former President George W. Bush who joined the court in 2006, is a consistently reliable vote for Trump and conservative causes. This term, he authored major rulings upholding several of the Trump’s administration’s immigration initiatives and was also in the majority as the conservative-majority court expanded executive power and sided against LGBTQ+ interests.
Earlier this year, CNN reported that Alito was taken to a hospital and treated for dehydration in March after becoming ill at a Federalist Society dinner in Philadelphia.
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Despite siding frequently with Trump both this term and in previous years, the justice told the newspaper he remains an independent member of the court.
“I vote in every case the way I think the case should be decided,” Alito said. “If that means a high correlation with what Trump wants, fine. If it means zero correlation with what Trump wants, fine as well.”
He continued: “I think it’s wrong, it’s absolutely wrong, to say, ‘Well, you know what? I’m going to decide some cases this way and some cases the other way so that people will say, ‘Well, he’s objective, because sometimes he favors this side and other times he favors that side.’”
“I’m not going to do that,” Alito said. “I’m going to decide them all the way that I think they should be decided. I explain why I’ve done it. People can agree, people can disagree.”
He also told Taranto that while he doesn’t “watch cable news at all anymore,” he assumes some analysts look at justices as individuals who are easily interchangeable with a like-minded, albeit younger, replacement.
“So yeah, 20-somethings, 30-somethings, particularly if they’re not lawyers, I’m sure that’s how they see the court,” he said.
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