Will Anthony Kennedy Retire? What Influences a Justice’s Decision
“If the incumbent president is of the same party as the president who nominated the justice to the court, and if the incumbent president is in the first two years of a four-year presidential term,” the study found, “then the justice has odds of resignation
that are about 2.6 times higher than when these two conditions are not met.”
Justices also take account of who controls the Senate and its internal rules.
“If I resign any time this year,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in the fall of 2014, less than two years into
President Obama’s second term, “he could not successfully appoint anyone I would like to see in the court.”
“So anybody who thinks that if I step down, Obama could appoint someone like me, they’re misguided,” she said.
“That’s not 100 percent true,” Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said in 1999,
six years before he died, “but it certainly is true in more cases than not.”
Such political calculations are perfectly proper, he said, as “deciding when to step down from the court is not a judicial act.”
For the second year in a row, rumors that Justice Anthony M. Kennedy may retire from the Supreme Court are sweeping Washington.
Justice Kennedy has long held the decisive vote in many of the Supreme Court’s most contested
and consequential cases, and his retirement would give President Trump the opportunity to move the court sharply to the right.
But Mr. Ward said Justice Kennedy is likely to emulate Justice Byron R. White, who drifted
to the right after his appointment by President John F. Kennedy, a Democrat.
