(Trends Wide) — Judge Stephen Breyer has notified the White House that his retirement will be effective Thursday, June 30, at noon ET.
In a letter to President Joe Biden, Breyer said it had been his “great honor” to participate as a judge in the “effort to uphold our Constitution and the rule of law.”
He said Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is prepared to “take the prescribed oaths” to begin her service as the 116th member of the court.
The fact that the court issues opinions and final orders on the same day reflects a more accelerated schedule than previous mandates. This suggests that the judges, who have been the target of death threats since the publication of a draft opinion annulling Roe v. Wade, they cannot wait for this momentous and divisive mandate to end as soon as possible.
There are two big pending cases related to the environment and immigration.
Breyer, who was appointed to the court in 1994 by then-President Bill Clinton, announced his retirement plans in January. The long-awaited decision was greeted with a collective sigh of relief from Democrats, who feared losing the job to a future Republican president should the 83-year-old lawyer ignore an intense lobbying campaign from the left. , which urged him to leave the court as long as Biden had a clear path to choose his replacement.
Breyer, who has been a consistent liberal vote on the Supreme Court, with an unflappable belief in the US system of government and a pragmatic view of the law, has tried to frame the law in a way that can work for the citizen. medium. He is not an arsonist and is quick to say that the Supreme Court cannot solve all of society’s problems. He often stressed that the court should not be seen as part of the political powers, but recognized that certain views might be unpopular.
In his later years on the bench, he was best known for a dissent he wrote in 2015 in a case involving execution by lethal injection. He took the opportunity to write separately and suggest that the court address the constitutionality of the death penalty.
In the opinion, Breyer wrote that after spending many years in court reviewing countless death penalty cases, he had come to question whether innocent people had been executed. He also feared that the sentence would be applied arbitrarily throughout the country. He noted that in some cases, those on death row could spend years awaiting execution, sometimes in solitary confinement.
Jackson, Breyer’s replacement, was confirmed by the Senate in April by a 53-47 vote, with three Republicans joining Democrats in voting yes. Although her addition to the court does not change its ideological balance, Jackson will be the first black woman to sit on the highest court in the country.
— Trends Wide’s Devan Cole and Wolf Blitzer contributed to this report.