‘Talking about them like meat that has reached its expiration date is unwise, uninformed, and, frankly, just crass,’ Leo said of the justices.
Leonard Leo, the influential legal activist who guided Donald Trump toward the selection of three conservative Supreme Court justices during his first term, is pushing back on the recent speculation that Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas will retire after the president-elect is inaugurated in January.
“No one other than Justices Thomas and Alito knows when or if they will retire, and talking about them like meat that has reached its expiration date is unwise, uninformed, and, frankly, just crass,” Leonard Leo, co-chairman of the Federalist Society, said in a statement obtained by National Review. “Justices Thomas and Alito have given their lives to our country and our Constitution, and should be treated with more dignity and respect than they are getting from some pundits.”
Leo’s forceful statement comes after Trump won reelection and Republicans retook the Senate, sparking predictions that Thomas, 76, or Alito, 74, would leave the Supreme Court to make room for the appointment of a younger replacement who would preserve the Court’s 6-3 conservative majority.
Following the decisive election results, Trump legal adviser Mike Davis speculated that Alito would be “gleefully packing up his chambers.” He predicted that Alito, not Thomas, would be the first justice to leave under a second Trump term.
“I imagine that Justice Alito will want to get the hell out of D.C. as quickly as possible,” said Davis, who runs the Article III Project that advocates for the nominations of conservative judges. “That’s who I would predict.”
Davis’s comments were cited in an NBC report speculating on the possibility that Trump will end up having the opportunity to appoint a majority of Supreme Court justices. If Trump were to choose two more justices during his second term, he would be the first president to appoint a majority to the Supreme Court since Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Trump previously appointed Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the Court — justices who proved instrumental in overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Davis previously served as the Senate GOP’s chief counsel for nominations to then-Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa). Grassley said in September that he would likely return to that role again if Republicans retook the Senate majority, which they did.
Now that at least 53 Republicans will control the upper chamber of Congress in the coming term, they will confirm conservative judges in their mission to reshape the judiciary branch. During his last term, Trump worked with Senate Republicans to name 234 federal judges.
Leo is reportedly not returning to advise Trump on judicial picks like he did previously, according to the Washington Post. The two have not spoken since 2020 after a heated disagreement at Mar-a-Lago.