Alito Confirms He Weighed Retiring This Year, Says He'll Reconsider Every Term

Since Alito recused himself from the Exxon climate case on September 28, the bigger question hanging over the 76-year-old justice has been whether he plans to retire at all. He answered it, sort of, in a CBS News interview clip released Friday, October 2.

Asked by CBS chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford whether he considered stepping down this year, Alito didn't dodge.

"I thought about it," he said. "It's something I think that somebody at my age has to think about every term. But I thought that I could still make a valuable contribution, which is why I became a justice and a judge in the first place."

When Crawford pressed on whether he'd keep revisiting the question, Alito said: "Yeah, I think I have to."

Alito did not announce his retirement. He acknowledged that retirement is now an annual calculation for the court's second-oldest member behind 78-year-old Clarence Thomas. The full interview airs Monday, October 5, the same day the new Supreme Court term opens.

Why the Timing Matters

Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters in April that if any justice were thinking about stepping down, sooner would be better for Republicans. "These guys, they make their own decisions," Thune said. "But if you were going to do something, obviously doing it when we have an opportunity, control of the Senate and the White House and everything else, is obviously, from a timing standpoint, would be certainly our preference."

Trump told Breitbart News in July he was "certainly prepared" to fill a vacancy, calling Alito "one of the greatest of all time" and saying he'd like to appoint a younger version of him. He didn't name names.

The math is straightforward. Republicans currently hold the Senate and can confirm a nominee without Democratic votes. If Democrats flip the Senate in November, Trump would need bipartisan cooperation to seat a replacement for the rest of his term. Alito knows this.

"It's too hard to predict what the political situation will be and what any president might do with respect to a replacement," he told Crawford, declining to engage with scenarios the way Thune and Trump already have.

The Ginsburg Comparison

Crawford also raised the historical parallel: Ruth Bader Ginsburg stayed on the bench past when many Democrats wanted her to retire, died in 2020, and Trump replaced her with Amy Coney Barrett, locking in the court's 6-3 conservative majority. Yahoo News noted that Justice Stephen Breyer took the opposite approach, retiring in June 2022 under pressure from Democrats specifically so President Biden could name a successor while the party still held the Senate. Biden picked Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Alito's answer suggests he's not going to let that comparison dictate his decision. Whether that's principled independence or risky brinksmanship depends entirely on who you ask, and neither side has the receipts to prove the other wrong yet. He's simply said he'll revisit the call every year, same as he's apparently done for several years now.

Dobbs, Lost Friendships, and a Leak

The interview also touched on Alito's authorship of the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade. He told Crawford the decision cost him "old friendships," adding, "That's something you have to live with. It's part of the job that you're going to displease people by making decisions on controversial matters, because one side or the other is going to really dislike you."

He also addressed the unprecedented leak of the draft opinion a month before the official release, saying producing the final version anyway "required courage because of the implications."

Georgetown Law professor Michele Goodwin has argued the ruling broke from decades of settled precedent rather than precedent that had already eroded, a critique Alito's defenders reject on originalist grounds, arguing the Constitution contains no explicit or implicit abortion right and the issue belongs with elected state officials. Neither side has new facts to add to that argument; it's the same fight it's been since June 2022.

What MEAWW Reported

MEAWW's write-up framed Alito as potentially stepping down "after next year's term" and said he'll "do so again in 2027," language that goes beyond anything Alito actually said on camera. The transcript shows Alito committing only to an annual reassessment, not a 2027 exit date.

The retirement question remains unresolved, revisited annually, and tied to whichever party controls the Senate after November. Alito's full CBS interview, part of a press run tied to his new book "So Ordered: An Originalist's View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country," airs Monday alongside the opening of the new Supreme Court term.