Alito Weighed Retiring and Will Revisit It Every Term

Justice Samuel Alito Weighed Retiring from the Supreme Court when its last term ended in June, and he expects the question to follow him into every future term. The 76-year-old justice said in a rare interview with CBS News chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford, excerpts of which circulated ahead of a broadcast scheduled for Monday, that he considered stepping down before deciding he still had work to do. "I thought about it," Alito told Crawford, adding that someone his age has to weigh the question every term. He stayed, he said, because he believed he could still make a "valuable contribution," the reason he became a judge in the first place. Asked whether that meant he would revisit retirement each year, he said he expected to.

The admission that Alito Weighed Retiring lands in a politically charged moment. For months, conservative commentators and some Republicans have openly hoped he would step aside while Donald Trump is in the White House and Republicans control the Senate, a combination that would let Trump choose a substantially younger conservative for the seat. Crawford pressed him on whether that pressure entered his thinking, and on whether staying risked a repeat of the history that followed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose death allowed Trump to install a conservative replacement. Alito declined to treat the decision as strategy, saying it was too hard to predict what the political situation would be or what any president might do with a replacement, and equally hard to predict what his own situation would look like a year or two from now.

A summer of rumors and retractions

The interview follows a summer in which retirement rumors chased the justice through the end of the term. On the court's final opinion day, NPR published a report saying Alito had announced his retirement. The report was wrong, and NPR retracted it, with reporter Nina Totenberg later apologizing to Alito in a letter. In August, Alito shut the speculation down himself, telling the Wall Street Journal he was there for another term. The CBS conversation adds a new layer to that record: Alito Weighed Retiring even as he publicly denied planning one.

Alito returned to the subject a day earlier in a separate interview. Fox News host Shannon Bream asked on Sunday whether he had a "calculation" for when he might leave the bench. It would be "foolhardy" to make one, he said, adding that he planned to serve for a certain number of additional years and that he was grateful for each day he could still do the job.

What his staying means for the court

For now, the court's composition is unchanged. The 6-3 conservative majority that has defined recent terms stays intact, with Alito anchoring the conservative bloc alongside Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, the last three of whom Trump appointed. Alito, nominated by President George W. Bush, took his seat in January 2006 and is the court's second-oldest member, behind Justice Clarence Thomas. He wrote the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the 2022 decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

The timing also explains why both parties are watching the court calendar so closely. With the midterm elections on the horizon, the balance of the Senate could shift, changing how easy or hard any future confirmation would be. A vacancy now would let the current president pick a younger successor and extend the conservative majority for a generation. A vacancy later, under a different Senate, could leave the seat contested for months and put the justice's own landmark opinions back in the spotlight. That uncertainty is exactly what Alito said he refuses to game out, and it is why a single interview about an annual personal question became a week of political arithmetic.

The stakes of the timing explain why the interview drew so much attention. A vacancy during Trump's presidency would hand him a fourth appointment and let him shape the court for decades, while a retirement after Democrats take the Senate could produce a far tougher confirmation fight. Alito announced no date and made no promise either way. His message, repeated across back-to-back interviews, was simpler: the thought of leaving has crossed his mind, the work still matters to him, and the question will be back next year.

The excerpts were reported by the Washington Examiner and Newsmax ahead of the full CBS broadcast. For a justice who rarely grants interviews, the candor was the story: Alito Weighed Retiring, stayed anyway, and said the question returns every term. According to CBS News, the full interview airs Monday.