The White House is making plans for when Justices Alito and Thomas die or retire: insiders

The only ways a Supreme Court Justice leaves office is through retirement, death or impeachment. President Donald Trump is preparing for one of the options for two of it oldest members, according to a report.

Impeachment seems unlikely, but TIME Magazine reported Tuesday that White House advisors and a close circle of conservative lawyers are getting ready for the other two options as Justices Clarence Thomas, 77, and Samuel Alito, 75, advance in age.

"Two people familiar with the White House vetting process said that the current front-runners for a potential Supreme Court vacancy are Andrew Oldham, a 5th circuit judge in Texas, and Neomi Rao, who sits on the influential District of Columbia Circuit Court," the report said.

The former is 46 and the latter 52.

Slate legal reporter Mark Joseph Stern remarked, "Oldham's campaign for the Supreme Court may have resulted in a slew of humiliating, lopsided reversals—but it has evidently succeeded in catching the attention of the Trump White House. This guy is barely even pretending to do law, so of course he's a SCOTUS frontrunner."

A White House official said, “We are looking for people in the mold of Alito, Clarence Thomas, and the late Scalia." That official confessed that it was "premature" to admit they're talking about a vacancy.

A death and a retirement allowed Trump to appoint two judges. He scored a third judge after the Senate Majority Leader refused to allow President Barack Obama to appoint a justice at the end of his term in office.

Lawfare's editor-in-chief, Benjamin Wittes, told TIME, “There’s a lot of anger at Amy Coney Barrett coming from the MAGA movement."

The Brookings Institution fellow anticipated, “I think you can imagine a very different type of nominee than we’ve had from Trump in the past.”

In a New York Times op-ed, legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin suggested that Trump is "grooming" his former attorney, Emil Bove, for the job.

"With a devoted executive branch and a compliant Congress, Mr. Trump has faced real resistance only from the judiciary, and the nomination of Mr. Bove marks the beginning of his counterattack," Toobin wrote.

Conservative lawyer Mike Davis confessed he hopes Alito and Thomas "do not retire any time soon" because they "are irreplaceable." Davis previously floated Trump loyalist Aileen Cannon, who threw out the case involving Trump and classified documents in Florida.

Read the full report here.