If Alito Retires Next Year, Where Will Trump Look for His Next Nominee?

If Justice Samuel Alito steps down from the Supreme Court next year, as he said he may do in an interview this week, the process of selecting his replacement will look very different from what it did in President Trump’s first term, when three associate justices were elevated to the court.Those three — Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — have ruled in Mr. Trump’s favor in the great majority of cases that came before them but have deeply disappointed the president by going against him on three high-profile cases concerning tariffs, mail-in voting and birthright citizenship. “These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court; they are merely a shell of their original selves,” he wrote in a Truth Social post on September 15. In a Time Magazine interview published Thursday, he added, “They voted against me too often. I gave them the position of a lifetime, and they vote against me often. They vote for me too.”Even before the latest setback, Mr. Trump had unleashed his wrath on the Federalist Society and its former chairman, Leonard Leo, who was instrumental in recommending the three first-term appointees. “I am so disappointed in the Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations,” he wrote on Truth Social in May 2025. “This is something that cannot be forgotten!” He went on to describe Mr. Leo as a “sleazebag” who “probably hates America.”While many second-term appointees to the lower courts still have deep roots in the Federalist Society, most court watchers believe Mr. Trump would turn for advice on an Alito replacement to congressional allies and his own inner circle, including Emil Bove and other attorneys who defended him in a series of criminal prosecutions. Speaking to Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business in May, the president said he already has a shortlist of nominees in mind, though he did not provide any names.The president’s options will be much more limited if Democrats capture control of the Senate in the midterm elections, giving them the power to reject any nominee they consider too conservative. Justice Alito, who resisted pressure to retire ahead of the midterms to guard against that eventuality, made clear in an interview aired Friday with CBS News that his decision will not rest on the political balance of power.The justice confirmed in the interview that he had considered retiring after the court’s most recent 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.” He said retirement is something he will have to “think about” every year going forward, but when asked whether he worries about his replacement being chosen by a Democrat, he said, “It’s too hard to predict what the political situation will be and what any president might do with respect to a replacement.”Depending on the timing of an Alito retirement, a Democrat-led Senate could also refuse to consider any nominee named by Mr. Trump, following the precedent set by the former Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell. Nine months before the 2016 presidential election, Mr. McConnell declined to consider President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, arguing that the choice should be left to the next president.Even before Justice Alito decides his future, the perennial guessing game of who might replace him is expected to heat up. Among the most frequently mentioned names is that of Mr. Bove, whose loyalty to the president is unquestioned after his having defended Mr. Trump in three criminal cases — the New York hush money case and the two prosecutions brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith. Judge Bove was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit last year.A half-dozen other leading prospects were identified in a June post on the Legalytics substack by a prominent Supreme Court scholar and former statistics editor for SCOTUSblog, Adam Feldman. Judges on his shortlist range in age from 47 to 56, meaning any of them could hope to spend two decades or more on the high court.Two of his choices — Judges James C. Ho, a former Texas solicitor general, and Andrew S. Oldham — currently sit on the conservative Fifth Circuit, where they have thick records “rich with en-banc culture-war dissents that delight movement conservatives,” Mr. Feldman wrote. Judge Neomi J. Rao’s pedigree includes having clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, a Trump favorite; prior to joining the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 2019, she led the president’s first-term drive to reduce federal regulations as head of the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.Seen as longer shots, Mr. Feldman named Judge Patrick J. Bumatay, an openly gay conservative who is valued “for his conservative output in the notoriously liberal Ninth Circuit,” and Amul R. Thapar, a former United States attorney who won the favor of Mr. McConnell with his folksy asides and historical vignettes. In his only reach into the district courts, Mr. Feldman identified Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who is best known for her handling of the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case in which she made repeated rulings favorable to Mr. Trump.

If Alito Retires Next Year, Where Will Trump Look for His Next Nominee?

If Alito Retires Next Year, Where Will Trump Look for His Next Nominee?

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