By stepping aside while Democrats are in power, Breyer averts a future disaster — but he can’t fix the current one
, Trump was able to shift a guaranteed liberal vote on the court to a solid conservative vote that could be on the court for another four decades. The long-term repercussions of this drastic ideological shift are hard to understate.
If Breyer waited, even if he waited just another year, it would be very possible that Republicans control the Senate again, giving Mitch McConnell the opportunity to, like , ignore any Biden nomination, hoping that a Republican would win in 2024 and have the opportunity to replace Breyer with a conservative. There is obviously no guarantee that’s what McConnell would have done, but he is ruthless, particularly around judicial nominations. Expecting him to help Biden appoint a liberal to replace Breyer would have been nonsense.
Diversifying the court with a younger justice will be a huge win for Biden . But expecting that new justice to change any outcomes on the current conservative-dominated Supreme Court would be wrong. The current court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Breyer is in the three-member liberal wing, and by many measures he is the most moderate of the three liberals.
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