Irked Alito breaks silence on retirement rumors and mortality as 'vultures' circle

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito declared he will serve another term and refused to rule out a "high correlation" between his rulings and what President Donald Trump wants.

Alito, 76, made the remarks in a rare summertime interview with the Wall Street Journal at his Washington chambers, a month after an erroneous NPR report set off a wave of speculation that he was stepping down.

The interview answered two questions that had shadowed the justice's 20th full term: Would he retire while Trump and a Republican Senate could lock in a younger replacement? And was he simply voting the way Trump wanted?

"Obviously I'm here for another term," Alito said.

On the partisanship charge, he was equally blunt. "I vote in every case the way I think the case should be decided," Alito told the Journal.

"If that means a high correlation with what Trump wants, fine. If it means zero correlation with what Trump wants, fine as well," he said. "I think it's wrong, it's absolutely wrong, to say, 'Well, you know what? I'm going to decide some cases this way and some cases the other way so that people will say, "Well, he's objective."' There have been people who've recommended to me that I do that. I'm not going to do that."

According to SCOTUSblog, Alito dissented in all three major cases the administration lost in the term just ended — on tariffs, birthright citizenship, and the president's attempt to fire a Federal Reserve governor.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote all three majority opinions, joined each time by the court's three liberal justices.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, in the tariffs case, called out Alito and two colleagues for inconsistency, noting they had voted against a Democratic president's use of the same sweeping executive authority they now defended for Trump, according to SCOTUSblog.

The retirement speculation began June 30, when NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg misheard an announcement by Chief Justice John Roberts about staff retirements and briefly published a story declaring Alito was leaving the bench. The report was retracted within minutes.

Calls for Alito to step aside have grown louder as Trump enters the final stretch of his term. Justice Stephen Breyer retired in 2022 under intense pressure from the left, clearing the way for a Democratic appointment. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg did not, a decision many liberals consider a historic miscalculation that helped produce the current conservative supermajority.

"It's not pleasant, in the sense that it's a reminder of mortality," Alito told the Journal. "It's like, what are those vultures doing up there? They are flying around. But it goes with life tenure."

He also dismissed the idea that he and a hypothetical younger replacement would be interchangeable.

"Yeah, I think some of those who call for the retirement of judges think that way," Alito said. He added that cable news panels of "20-somethings, 30-somethings, particularly if they're not lawyers," have no appreciation of what the court actually does.

On the law itself, Alito pushed back against critics who say his brand of originalism — reading the Constitution as it was understood when adopted — is just conservatism in disguise.

"You can take an important principle that is in the Constitution, like equal treatment," he said, "and if you view it at a very high level of generality, you can say that the Constitution requires equal treatment in a context that never occurred to, or never could have occurred to, those who adopted the provision."

With the 2026 midterms approaching and Senate control uncertain, the window for a Republican-confirmed replacement could close as soon as November.