Sotomayor’s obligation to liberalism

Justice Sonia Sotomayor is “the greatest liberal to sit on the Supreme Court in my adult lifetime,” said Mehdi Hasan, but she “needs to retire”—now. The court’s first Latina justice has proven herself a bracing, cathartic dissenting voice against its six-justice conservative supermajority. But she should not repeat the catastrophic mistake made by another liberal folk hero, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. After being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2009, Ginsburg stubbornly resisted calls for her to step down. Ginsburg died in 2020, and President Donald Trump and a Republican-controlled Senate immediately installed the conservative Amy Coney Barrett in her place—enabling court conservatives to overturn Roe. Sotomayor, 70, has type 1 diabetes, and travels with a medic. If Trump wins and she doesn’t survive his term, he will replace her with a “far-right Federalist Society apparatchik,” and a 7-2 court will be even more aggressively radical. Even if Biden wins re-election, the GOP is expected to gain control of the Senate and will likely block him from replacing Sotomayor through 2028. It might seem callous to pressure Sotomayor to step down from a job she loves, but for her to risk her seat is “nothing short of insane.”