Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor is facing renewed calls to step down in the face of an incoming Trump administration, in the hopes that President Biden might nominate another justice before the president-elect takes office on January 20th.
The Court is currently composed of a 6-3 conservative majority, whose politics is reflected in a series of extreme right-wing decisions. SCOTUS’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision in 2022 removed the right to an abortion at the federal level, overturning a 50-year precedent and leading to restrictive state-level laws on the issue, some of which have led directly to pregnant women dying due to lack of care. This past summer, the Court also severely limited the power of federal agencies in the Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo case, overturning the longstanding “Chevron doctrine” which gave them broader latitude to craft policies that meet the standards set by Congress. Stanford Law School’s Deborah Sivas explained it thusly when the decision was handed down: “it is more than a bit scary to think that federal judges – many of whom are increasingly ideological and almost none of whom have specialized training beyond a JD – are now more empowered to strike down agency rules and actions they don’t like.”
Many left-of-center pundits have called for Sotomayor to step down in recent days, arguing that Biden’s lame-duck session (the period between the November election and a new incoming president’s inauguration on January 20th) should be used to take advantage of the slim majority in the Senate to replace the ailing Sotomayor with someone who might last longer in the lifetime SCOTUS position. CNN legal analyst Bakari Sellers even suggested nominating Kamala Harris to her seat.
Such a move remains unlikely, however, with or without Harris. The Republican party lowered the threshold for approving nominations to the Court from 60 votes in the Senate to 51 during Trump’s first term, and Democrats do currently enjoy a 51-seat majority in that chamber of Congress. Still, Senator Joe Manchin, who is retiring from the Senate, probably will not vote with his party, having already said last spring that he would not vote for a replacement to Sotomayor’s seat without a Republican on board. Manchin has deep ties to the coal industry and has stymied any of his party’s efforts that threatened those interests in the past, having been a major factor in stopping Biden’s Build Back Better Act, which would have accelerated investments in green energy sources. A conservative Supreme Court is more favorable to the interests of fossil fuel companies.
President-elect Trump is already guaranteed a majority in the Senate, and if Sotomayor’s seat (or any of the other liberal justices’) is vacated during his second term, the Supreme Court could go to a 7-2 conservative majority, entrenching its already deeply conservative streak for decades to come.
