Donald Trump’s election victory means that he should have the opportunity to perpetuate a strong conservative majority on the Supreme Court for at least the next twenty years. Let’s review the basics:
1. Clarence Thomas (age 76) and Samuel Alito (74) are the two oldest justices on the Court. Trump’s three appointees to the Court—Brett Kavanaugh (59), Neil Gorsuch (57), and Amy Coney Barrett (52)—are among the four youngest justices. (Ketanji Brown Jackson is 54.)
2. If Trump is able to replace Thomas and Alito, their replacements will almost surely be younger than Kavanaugh and Gorsuch. That means that Kavanaugh would be the oldest of the five Trump appointees on the Court. All five would be very likely to serve until 2045 or so (or, if they retire earlier, to do so at a time they can be replaced by another conservative).
3. The new Senate will have at least 52 Republican senators and perhaps as many as 55. Thanks to the abolition of the filibuster, any high-quality Supreme Court nominee will be easily confirmed.
4. Trump will have plenty of excellent candidates to choose from. Of the 50-plus judges he appointed to the federal courts of appeals in his first term, some 15 or 20 more than 30* are in the right age range to be considered for the Supreme Court, and many of them would rightly be regarded as outstanding candidates. (I’m not going to name names.)
5. I expect Alito to announce his retirement in the spring of 2025.
6. I hear some folks say that Thomas won’t retire. But it would be foolish of him to risk repeating Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s mistake—hanging on only to die in office and be replaced by someone with a very different judicial philosophy. He will recognize that the best way to entrench his jurisprudential legacy is to enable a strong originalist to fill his seat and secure an originalist majority for the coming decades. Among the many candidates are several of his own former law clerks. So expect him to decide to retire in the spring of 2026.
7. I’m not even factoring in here the strong possibility that Chief Justice Roberts or one of the liberal justices will be replaced by a young conservative justice at some point over the next ten or twenty years.
* I’ve corrected my initial miscount. (I was looking at a different list.)