Will Anthony Kennedy Retire? What Influences a Justice’s Decision<br />“If the incumbent president is of the same party as the president who nominated the justice to the court, and if the incumbent president is in the first two years of a four-year presidential term,” the study found, “then the justice has odds of resignation<br />that are about 2.6 times higher than when these two conditions are not met.”<br />Justices also take account of who controls the Senate and its internal rules.<br />“If I resign any time this year,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in the fall of 2014, less than two years into<br />President Obama’s second term, “he could not successfully appoint anyone I would like to see in the court.”<br />“So anybody who thinks that if I step down, Obama could appoint someone like me, they’re misguided,” she said.<br />“That’s not 100 percent true,” Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said in 1999,<br />six years before he died, “but it certainly is true in more cases than not.”<br />Such political calculations are perfectly proper, he said, as “deciding when to step down from the court is not a judicial act.”<br />For the second year in a row, rumors that Justice Anthony M. Kennedy may retire from the Supreme Court are sweeping Washington.<br />Justice Kennedy has long held the decisive vote in many of the Supreme Court’s most contested<br />and consequential cases, and his retirement would give President Trump the opportunity to move the court sharply to the right.<br />But Mr. Ward said Justice Kennedy is likely to emulate Justice Byron R. White, who drifted<br />to the right after his appointment by President John F. Kennedy, a Democrat.
