Justice Samuel Alito told the Wall Street Journal he is staying on the Supreme Court, shutting down weeks of retirement chatter fueled by an erroneous NPR report and pressure from those eager to see his seat filled.
The 76-year-old justice, appointed by President George W. Bush in 2006, made his intentions plain in a rare summertime interview with the Journal's James Taranto, published Friday. "Obviously I'm here for another term," Alito said. The new term begins in October 2026.
That five-word sentence closes a chapter of speculation that began in earnest on June 30, when NPR legal correspondent Nina Totenberg published a pre-written story announcing Alito's retirement. NPR pulled the piece within minutes. Totenberg later said she had misheard an announcement about staff retirements at the court and apologized to Alito directly.
But the damage was done. The erroneous report set off a cascade of political positioning that revealed just how closely Washington watches the court's conservative majority, and how quickly the machinery of nomination politics can spin up on a false signal.
Retirement speculation did not begin with NPR's blunder. As early as April, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said he would push Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas or Mike Lee of Utah as replacements if Alito stepped down. Grassley said his committee was "fully prepared" to process a nominee before the midterm elections.
President Trump, in a July Oval Office interview with Breitbart News, said he was "certainly prepared" for a possible vacancy. He called Alito "one of the greatest of all time" and said "nobody" could truly replace him.
Had Alito retired, Trump would have had the chance to appoint a fourth Supreme Court justice, a prospect that energized allies and alarmed opponents in equal measure. Alito's decision to stay removes that possibility for now and leaves the court's ideological balance untouched heading into the fall term.
Alito did not hide his irritation at the pressure campaign. He compared those urging his departure to scavengers overhead.
"It's not pleasant, in the sense that it's a reminder of mortality. It's like, what are those vultures doing up there? They are flying around. But it goes with life tenure."
The justice, as the Washington Examiner noted, has served on the court for over 20 years. He wrote the 2022 majority opinion overturning the constitutional right to abortion, a decision that made him one of the most consequential and most targeted justices of his generation. This term, he authored rulings upholding several Trump administration immigration initiatives, including cases involving deportations of Haitian and Syrian nationals and tariff-related disputes.
Those rulings have drawn accusations from the left that Alito functions as a political ally of the Trump White House rather than an independent jurist. Alito addressed that charge head-on.
"I vote in every case the way I think the case should be decided. If that means a high correlation with what Trump wants, fine. If it means zero correlation with what Trump wants, fine as well."
He also dismissed the idea that younger analysts and commentators understand the court's work, telling the Journal: "So yeah, 20-somethings, 30-somethings, particularly if they're not lawyers, I'm sure that's how they see the court."
The June 30 episode at NPR deserves a closer look. News organizations routinely prepare obituaries and retirement stories for aging public figures. That practice is standard. What is not standard is publishing one prematurely based on a misheard announcement, and doing so with enough detail that it briefly passed as confirmed news.
NPR retracted the story within minutes and later added an editor's note. Totenberg, a veteran legal correspondent, attributed the mistake to mishearing an internal court announcement about staff departures. She apologized to Alito. But the retraction did not stop the speculation from spreading. It fed into an existing narrative, pushed by some Republican strategists and commentators, that Alito and fellow conservative Justice Clarence Thomas should step down while the GOP holds the Senate and the White House.
Thomas, 77, actually a year older than Alito, or 78 by some accounts, has drawn less retirement speculation despite his age. The reasons for that gap are not entirely clear, but Alito's higher public profile after the abortion ruling and his visibility in Trump-era cases may explain why the pressure has concentrated on him.
Alito's refusal to time his departure for partisan advantage reflects the design of Article III of the Constitution, which grants federal judges life tenure precisely to insulate them from political pressure. The Framers understood that judges who worry about their successors stop being judges and start being politicians.
That principle has been tested repeatedly in recent years. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's decision to remain on the bench through the Obama years, and her death during Trump's first term, gave Republicans a seat that reshaped the court. Justice Stephen Breyer retired under President Biden, a move widely understood as strategically timed to let Democrats fill his seat while they still held the Senate. The New York Post noted that a genuine Alito retirement would have given Trump the opportunity to appoint a fourth justice.
Alito's answer to all of this is simple: he decides cases on the merits, and he is not leaving. He told the Journal he no longer watches cable news, a detail that suggests he has little interest in the daily cycle of speculation about his future.
The vultures will have to keep circling. Life tenure means the justice, not the Senate, not the commentariat, and not a botched NPR report, decides when the seat opens.
