Donald Trump has already appointed three Supreme Court justices. In his second term, he could well have a chance to name two more, creating a high court with a Trump-appointed majority that could serve for decades. The decisive outcome spares the court from having to wade into election disputes. It also seems likely to change the tenor of cases that come before the justices, including on abortion and immigration, the Associated Press reports. The two oldest justices — Clarence Thomas, 76, and Samuel Alito, 74 — could consider stepping down knowing that Trump, a Republican, would nominate replacements who might be three decades younger and ensure conservative domination of the court through the middle of the century, or beyond. Already, Amy Coney Barrett, along with Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s other two high court appointees, have joined Thomas and Alito to overturn Roe v. Wade and end the national right to abortion. Along with Chief Justice John Roberts, the conservatives also have expanded gun rights, ended affirmative action in college admissions, reined in Biden administration efforts to deal with climate change and weakened federal regulators by overturning a 40-year-old decision that had long been a target of business and conservative interests.
Thomas has said on more than one occasion that he has no intention of retiring. But Ed Whelan, a conservative lawyer who was once a law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, wrote on the National Review’s Bench Memos blog that Thomas will realize that the best way to burnish his legacy is to have a like-minded justice replace him and retire before the midterm congressional elections. If Thomas stays on the court until near his 80th birthday, in June 2028, he will surpass William O. Douglas, the court's longest-serving justice, who served for more than 36 years. There’s no guarantee Republicans will have their Senate majority then, and Thomas saw what happened when one of his colleagues didn’t retire when she might have. “It would be foolish of him to risk repeating Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s mistake — hanging on only to die in office and be replaced by someone with a very different judicial philosophy,” Whelan wrote. After Ginsburg died in September 2020, less than two months before Joe Biden’s election as president, Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to fill the vacancy and majority Republicans rammed her nomination through the Senate before the election.