September 12, 2021

Justice Breyer: “I Don’t Intend to Die on the Court”

The 83-year-old jurist continues to reject calls for his retirement.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer Steven Senne/AP Photo

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Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has been on something of a media blitz this past week, giving a series of well-publicized interviews about his new book, The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics. Today, he appeared on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, where he once again disappointed Democrats by refusing to say when he might retire.

Liberals are desperately hoping the 83-year-old jurist will step down soon, while there’s a Democrat in the White House and the partly still narrowly controls the Senate. They fear that if Breyer doesn’t call it a career, he will join the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg in being replaced by an arch conservative who will undo any legacy of progress he had hoped to achieve. But the justice has shown no signs of budging.

Breyer, the avuncular former Harvard law professor best known for issuing mind-boggling legal hypotheticals from the bench, has been stubbornly resisting those calls, even while milking the speculation for coverage of his new book. Over the past week, he’s given an unusual number of media interviews—interviews that have been, as most Supreme Court justice interviews are, rather opaque and pedantic and not especially newsworthy. On Fox, after waving around his pocket Constitution like a bespectacled Ammon Bundy, Breyer launched into a discussion about Alexander Hamilton and a civics lesson on the three branches of government, before Wallace got to the question on everyone’s mind: his potential retirement.

Wallace showed Breyer a clip of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who said in no uncertain terms back in 2012 that he did not want a Democratic president to replace him with someone who would undo all the work he’d done over 25 years to move the court to the right. In response, Breyer said, “I don’t intend to die on the bench,” but beyond that, he explained that he didn’t retire this spring because, well, he didn’t want to. “I didn’t retire, because I decided on balance that I wouldn’t retire,” he said.

But have you heard he has a new book out?

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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