What Next - Bye Bye, Breyer
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 27 January 2022
⏱️ 26 minutes
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Summary
This week, Justice Stephen G. Breyer is expected to announce his plan to retire from the Supreme Court at the end of its term this summer. Breyer’s signal comes after a year-long pressure campaign from the political left and others anxious to ensure that Democrats control who replaces the court’s most senior liberal justice.
Guest: Mark Joseph Stern, who covers courts and the law for Slate.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, Mark Joseph Stern. |
| 0:09.3 | Hi, what a day, huh? |
| 0:12.0 | Mark covers the Supreme Court for Slate. |
| 0:15.1 | How are your notifications doing? |
| 0:17.0 | I had to shut them all off. |
| 0:19.3 | I did that new focus mode, you know, on my phone because otherwise it would have actually exploded into flames. |
| 0:29.0 | I called Markup because yesterday we learned Justice Stephen Breyer was going to do something many progressives had been anxiously pushing him to do for a year. |
| 0:40.7 | Retire. It's traditional for justices to announce these kind of moves in the summer after they've |
| 0:46.0 | worked through their annual docket. It just cuts down on the awkward lame duck phase. So even though |
| 0:51.9 | Breyer is 83 years old, the most senior justice by far, this was a January |
| 0:59.0 | surprise for a lot of reporters. Not Mark, though. Look, I will say not to give myself too much credit, |
| 1:06.2 | I predicted a little while ago that Breyer would not step down during the first summer of Biden's presidency and would step down during the second. |
| 1:16.4 | Why did you predict that? |
| 1:17.8 | He has such a romantic view of the court. |
| 1:22.7 | He believes that it is a genuinely independent, nonpartisan institution. And I think he would have |
| 1:29.0 | felt like it was a little partisan, a little unsavory for him to just suddenly retire because |
| 1:36.9 | there was a Democrat in the White House. And yet, having a Democrat in the White House |
| 1:42.4 | certainly factored into Justice Breyer's decision here. |
| 1:46.2 | He's a reliable liberal who's watched the GOP fill the bench with one deeply conservative justice after another. |
| 1:54.2 | To the point that now, his simple and logical choice to retire 30-odd years after becoming eligible to join the AARP is headline news. |
| 2:04.2 | Well, it's funny because it's only really a big deal in light of the last few years of tumult with |
| 2:12.6 | regard to Supreme Court confirmations, right? |
... |
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