The Guardian
The 83-year-old US supreme court justice is stepping down – and allowing Biden to chose a successor before the midterms. Thank God for that.
hat sound you hear is Democrats in Washington and across the country letting out a sigh of profound relief: Associate Justice Stephen Breyer is retiring in June, at the end of the US supreme court’s current term. News of the 83-year-old’s choice to step down broke on Wednesday – evidently a little earlier than the man himself would have liked – giving Joe Biden his first opportunity to fill a vacancy on the nation’s highest court.
The decision from Breyer ends months of speculation and a determined pressure campaign to convince the ageing liberal justice to retire while Democrats still held both the White House and the Senate, that rare and precarious circumstance that is now required for any Democratic president to see his federal court nominees confirmed. Breyer’s decision to step down this summer gives the Democrats a narrow window to appoint his replacement before they are expected to lose control of the Senate in the November midterms.
Breyer’s retirement, after nearly 30 years as a justice, will not change the balance of power on the supreme court, which has heaved dramatically rightward since Justice Anthony Kennedy chose to retire under Donald Trump in 2018. Nor will his exit mitigate what are likely to be ruinous outcomes in this term’s major rulings, which include the hateful Dobbs v Jackson, the case that is almost certain to overturn Roe v Wade. The benefits of his timely exit aren’t so much ameliorative as preventive: because he has retired under a Democratic trifecta, he has ensured that the supreme court’s conservative 6-3 supermajority will at least stay 6-3, and not become and insurmountable 7-2. But the extremist makeup of an increasingly maximalist rightwing court will continue.
What his retirement does bring to an end is a long legal and political career of the kind that has since become unfeasible. Breyer’s early career was marked by the industrious bipartisanship of the latter 20th century, and he helped shape that era’s neoliberal consensus.
When he was young, Breyer was a legal academic at Harvard – read any biography of a federal courts judge and the words “legal academic at Harvard” are likely to appear –and he wrote inventively about the prerogatives of executive agencies, a field known as administrative law. He favored deregulation, and took several leaves of absence from teaching throughout the 1970s to work as a special counsel to Democrats in the US Senate; among his accomplishments there was shepherding the deregulation of the airline industry.
Read full article at
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/27/liberals-relief-justice-breyer-retirement
