IS IT POSSIBLE THAT SAM ALITO ISN'T RETIRING?

Okay, this is weird:

NPR on Tuesday retracted an article that said that Samuel Alito, an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, had retired.

The article, written by the veteran Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg, said that Justice Alito had announced his retirement. He has made no such announcement about his role, and a Supreme Court spokesman on Tuesday called NPR’s article “inaccurate.”

By midmorning Tuesday, the article had been replaced with a taciturn editor’s note: “Earlier today we erroneously published a story saying that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was retiring. He has not announced his retirement and we have retracted the story.”

The retraction is here. The original story is here.

In February, Elie Mystal concluded that Alito is planning to retire, based on the fact that the publication date of Alito's forthcoming book would place his publicity tour in the opening week's of the Supreme Court's upcoming term. Alito probably won't want to delay publication of the book and he'll certainly want to publicize it, so I assume the retirement is going ahead, and he simply didn't want the news to break just yet. He knows that we might have a Democratic Senate next year, which means that a replacement as ideologically extreme as he is might not be confirmable for two years. And he knows that a Democrat might win the White House in 2028.

But is it possible he's not retiring after all?

Maybe he's not certain that President Trump will appoint an ideologically compatible replacement. Trump denounced the Federalist Society last month, after the Supreme Court ruled against his tariffs. The FedSoc is an ideological-conformity clearinghouse for right-wing judicial appointees, and Alito might be afraid that Trump will bypass it when he chooses the next High Court justice.

On the other hand, as The Hill has noted, "All but one of Trump’s confirmed circuit court nominees have appeared at a Federalist Society event.... The only exception is Emil Bove, one of Trump’s former personal lawyers whom he nominated to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit." Does Alito fear that Trump will pick one of his own mob lawyers for the Court?

Or does Alito fear that the increasingly erratic Trump might mismanage the process of getting a successor approved this year? Republicans presumably want the successor confirmed with the brutal efficiency they displayed when they rammed through Amy Coney Barrett's nomination in 2020. Or maybe they want to allow a little more time, in the hope that the pick will be controversial, and Democrats will overreact. Some Republicans think they benefited electorally from the Democratic reaction to Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. Here's a NBC story from October of that year:

Republicans got everything they wanted from Brett Kavanaugh's hotly contested confirmation — a fired-up GOP base and a conservative Supreme Court justice for life....

Republicans celebrated the reaction to Kavanaugh's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee after limited polling suggested their voters had closed the enthusiasm gap with Democrats.

Republicans were trounced in House races that year, but they picked up two Senate seats. I've seen it argued that angry demonstrations against Kavanaugh in the halls of the Senate and allegations of sexual misconduct led to a backlash that helped GOP Senate candidates. I'm not sure it's true, but Republicans might think it is.

Maybe Alito doesn't trust that second-term Trump can manage a nomination fight well, or keep the Senate calendar clear for a confirmation process.

More likely, Alito and his fellow Republicans wants to keep non-Republicans guessing for as long as possible while the GOP gets its ducks lined up in a row. I assume we'll get the official announcement later this summer, unless the people running the GOP judicial machine conclude that Trump is too erratic and really can't be trusted.