(Headline USA) A number of Senate Democrats hinted at their support for an effort by leftist activists to force Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor to retire before November’s election.
Worried that President Joe Biden will lose to former President Donald Trump, potentially giving Trump the opportunity to replace yet another liberal justice on the court, leftists have demanded that the 69-year-old Sotomayor, the oldest Democrat-appointed justice, step down now.
Leftists previously waged a campaign to force out Bill Clinton-appointed Justice David Souter, currently 84, giving Biden the opportunity to replace him with a black woman, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Even if Trump—who has consistently led in polling among key demographics and in several of the crucial battleground states—were to lose in November, a favorable political map is likely to give Republicans the Senate majority—forcing, at best, a compromise on the would-be replacement.
Though congressional Democrats have not specifically endorsed the demands for her resignation, they have expressed support for the sentiment behind those demands.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., for example, said that while he believed Sotomayor was “highly accomplished” and a “fully functioning justice right now,” she should “weight the competing factors.”
“I’m very respectful of Justice Sotomayor. I have great admiration for her,” he told NBC News.
“But … we should learn a lesson, and it’s not like there’s any mystery here about what the lesson should be,” he added. “The old saying—graveyards are full of indispensable people—ourselves in [the Senate] included.”
Blumenthal was referring to the death of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose vacancy Trump was able to fill with Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
“Justices have to make their personal decisions about their health and their level of energy, but also to keep in mind the larger national and public interest in making sure that the court looks and thinks like America,” Blumenthal said.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., also raised Ginsburg as an important lesson, while clarifying that he was “not joining any calls” for Sotomayor to leave the court. However, he said he worried what another Trump appointment might do for the court’s “extremist wing.”
He added, “Run it to 7-2 and you go from a captured court to a full MAGA court,” Whitehouse said. “Certainly I think if Justice Ginsburg had it to do over again, she might have rethought her confidence in her own health.”
At the time, Democrats were less certain in Ginsburg’s health as in the inevitability of Hillary Clinton’s ascension to the presidency.
Despite their indignation over Barrett’s appointment to the court, many Democrats also have continued to seethe over the fact that former President Barack Obama was denied the opportunity to flip the seat held by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, putting radically corrupt future Attorney General Merrick Garland on the bench and giving the court—at the time—a liberal majority shortly before the 2020 election.
Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., refused to call the nomination for a vote, arguing that its proximity to the election meant voters should decide instead.
