‘It Makes No Sense’: Democrats Reject Calls For Sonia Sotomayor To Retire Early

"I think Justice Sotomayor is doing a terrific job, and I think she’ll be doing a terrific job for years to come,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

WASHINGTON – Senate Democrats dismissed calls for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor to step down in order to ensure President Joe Biden has the chance to name her successor while his party controls the Senate this year.

“I don’t think there’s anything I know about her medical condition that would disqualify her from continuing. I don’t see any reason why she wouldn’t” keep serving, said Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“It makes no sense to me. I think Justice Sotomayor is doing a terrific job, and I think she’ll be doing a terrific job for years to come,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) added in an interview with HuffPost.

Some progressives and political commentators, including Nate Silver and Josh Barro, have argued that Sotomayor, who at 69 is the oldest of three Democratic-appointed justices, should retire to avoid a repeat of what happened with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The late justice resisted calls to step down while Democrats held the Senate in 2014 under President Barack Obama, and her death in 2020 at age 87 from cancer allowed Republicans to appoint a 6-3 conservative majority on the court that repealed federal abortion rights, with more major GOP legal victories on the horizon.

Sotomayor’s only publicly known health condition is Type 1 diabetes, which isn’t life threatening if treated properly. Still, some on the left fear that it could take years until Democrats get another opportunity to fill a seat on the court. Biden’s shaky political standing versus presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and the brutal map for Senate Democrats this cycle are compounding those worries.