Breyer contemplates retirement, politics
WASHINGTON — Justice Stephen Breyer says he is struggling to decide when to retire from the Supreme Court and is taking account of a host of factors, including who will name his successor.
“There are many things that go into a retirement decision,” he said. He recalled approvingly something that Justice Antonin Scalia had told him.
“He said, ‘I don’t want somebody appointed who will just reverse everything I’ve done for the last 25 years,’ ” Breyer said during a wide-ranging interview Thursday. “That will inevitably be in the psychology” of his decision, he said.
Breyer, 83, is the oldest member of the court and the target of campaigners who want him to step down to ensure that President Joe Biden can name his successor.
The justice is promiting his new book, The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics, scheduled to be published next month. In it, Beyer argues that the court’s authority is undermined by labeling justices as conservative or liberal. Drawing a distinction between law and politics, Breyer wrote that not all splits on the court were predictable and that those that were could generally be explained by differences in judicial philosophy or interpretive methods.
In the interview, he acknowledged that the politicians who had transformed confirmation hearings into partisan brawls held a different view, but he said the justices acted in good faith, often finding consensus and occasionally surprising the public in significant cases.
“My experience from more than 30 years as a judge has shown me that anyone taking the judicial oath takes it very much to heart,” he wrote. “A judge’s loyalty is to the rule of law, not the political party that helped to secure his or her appointment.”