Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has ongoing plans for the Supreme Court, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
"Alito isn’t merely a favored legal mind of MAGA world," said the report. Uniquely among the right-wing justices, "he has managed to merge pro-Trump, antiestablishment forces with the more traditional wing of legal conservatism, long dominated by groups such as the Federalist Society."
"In so doing, he is quietly charting the future of a conservative legal movement that is facing an identity crisis" — and it's what allows him to almost exclusively vote on the side of Trump and the GOP in political cases, noted the Journal, as he was in the majority of basically every case where the GOP-appointed justices were a bloc, and even wanted to at least partially uphold Trump's executive order abolishing birthright citizenship.
Furthermore, "Alito has signaled that, at least for now, he isn’t going anywhere."
Rumors swirled for months that he may be timing his exit soon to ensure his seat isn't left to the control of a Democratic Congress. However, per the Journal, "People close to him say they don’t expect him to retire this summer or fall. And in a strong indication that he intends to stay through at least June 2027, he has hired a full roster of four law clerks for next term, according to a person close to Alito."
This comes after a massive blunder at NPR, which at the end of the Supreme Court's current term published an apparent pre-write of Alito's retirement in the event he made the announcement, then had to quickly retract it as no such thing happened.
