Monday’s action casts in stark relief the dilemma of retirement timing and the consequences of the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision to remain on the bench through her 80s.
The Ginsburg effect cannot help but be entangled with the choice facing Breyer. And the abortion-rights dilemma adds to the many elements that could steer his timing. For any justice, the decision typically involves a nuanced consideration of personal factors, institutional concerns and political realities.
And those can often be in conflict, as has been brought home for Democrats with Ginsburg’s situation. She died last September at age 87 just weeks before the presidential election and Donald Trump’s defeat. She had wanted to outlive his presidency and reportedly made a deathbed request that the next president appoint her successor.
But Ginsburg had also spurned the calls of fellow liberals to retire when President Barack Obama was in office and the Senate in Democratic hands.
Hers was just one of the more pointed laments on social media Monday regarding the Ginsburg-to-Barrett succession.
Breyer has likely heard that drumbeat. And he knows that important cases will continue to reach the court, no matter which nine individuals sit there. At some point, realities related to personal health or even Senate politics intrude on individual interests.
That moniker and meme began in public admiration of a dissenting opinion she wrote as the majority rolled back the 1965 Voting Rights Act in 2013. It was around that time that liberals began publicly urging her to retire while both the White House and Senate were in Democratic hands. Obama invited her to lunch that year.
Ginsburg resisted overt and subtle overtures. In 2014, she responded to a question I asked about liberal pressure with a rhetorical question of her own: “So tell me who the President could have nominated this spring that you would rather see on the court than me?”
Many on the left have cited the Ginsburg situation as they publicly urge Breyer to retire, to guarantee that Democratic President Joe Biden can appoint a younger liberal while the Senate is in Democratic hands, by a single vote.
Breyer, a former Senate Judiciary Committee staffer, has remained wise to the ways of the Senate and he knows the advantages of a Democratic majority to Biden. He also would be aware that, barring the illness or death of a crucial Democratic senator, that majority should hold until the 2022 elections.
Such dire possibilities rattle advocates on the left, who say Breyer should retire this year rather than next. Breyer has declined to respond to questions about his retirement desires or the pressure, which included a mobile billboard truck circling Capitol Hill earlier this spring and calling on Breyer to step down, sponsored by Demand Justice, a liberal group.
Breyer, a former law professor, is known for trying to sidestep friction and, among the nine, trying to build consensus. In an April Harvard lecture, he asserted that the justices were not as politically motivated or divided as they appear. The bench is now split between six Republican-appointed conservatives and three Democratic-appointed liberals.
Yet the liberalism of Breyer, a 1994 appointee of President Bill Clinton, has more and more left him to dissent on the increasingly Republican-dominated conservative court.
As he acknowledged those differences and worked across the ideological divide, Breyer was able to keep a majority of five justices together to strike down state laws that restricted women’s access to abortion. But the retirement of former ally Justice Anthony Kennedy (succeeded by Brett Kavanaugh), as well as the death of women’s rights beacon Ginsburg, has made this a whole new court on abortion rights.
As Breyer balances his own personal timing for retirement and considers his influence on cases, this may be one area of the law he will count as lost.
