Supreme Court Justice Kennedy announces retirement
WASHINGTON – Justice Anthony Kennedy announced Wednesday that he is retiring from the Supreme Court, a move that will give President Donald Trump a chance to replace the pivotal justice and solidify a majority on the court that takes a plain-language view of the Constitution.
“It has been the greatest honor and privilege to serve our nation in the federal judiciary for 43 years, 30 of those years on the Supreme Court,” Kennedy, 81, said in a statement released in the afternoon of the last day of the term. He said his final day will be July 31.
His opinions often spoke of “dignity” and “liberty,” and his notions of how the Constitution provides for and protects them had an outsize effect on Americans.
Kennedy cast the deciding vote that found a constitutional right for samesex couples to marry. He determined how much government may regulate abortion; whether attempts to curtail political speech; and how and when it is appropriate for government to exercise affirmative action.
His decisions shielded juveniles and the intellectually disabled from the death penalty, although he refused
to find capital punishment unconstitutional. He found that those seized in the fight against terrorism had rights in U.S. courts. And that is only a partial list of the issues on which he was key.
Kennedy informed Trump of his decision in a letter.
“My dear Mr. President,” he wrote. “For a member of the legal profession it is the highest of honor to serve on this court. Please permit me by this letter to express my profound gratitude for having had the privilege to seek in each case how best to know, interpret and defend the Constitution and the laws that must always conform to its mandates and promises.”
A Supreme Court news release from Kennedy said that his family was willing for him to continue to serve, but that he had “a deep desire to spend more time with them.”
Kennedy visited with the president in the White House on Wednesday, and they met for about half an hour, Trump said. The president said he asked whether Kennedy had any recommendations for his replacement, but did not say whether Kennedy answered.
“Hopefully,” Trump said, “we will pick someone who is just as outstanding.”
Kennedy’s colleagues also did not receive much warning of his announcement. There was no mention of it as the court delivered its final decisions of the term.
“His jurisprudence prominently features an abiding commitment to liberty and the personal dignity of every person,” Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. said in a statement. “Justice Kennedy taught collegiality and civil discourse by example.”
The Californian joined the court in 1988 as a compromise choice of President Ronald Reagan, and has been the deciding vote on so many issues that Erwin Chemerinsky, now dean at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, once joked that he “would put Justice Kennedy’s photo on the cover” of a brief if the court’s rules allowed it.
Trump has publicized a list of 25 state and federal judges from which he has said he will choose.