Justice Samuel Alito has a short answer for the people who have spent months treating his departure as inevitable: he is not leaving.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, the 76-year-old justice said, “Obviously I’m here for another term.” The next Supreme Court session begins in October and runs into the summer of 2027. The 6–3 conservative majority remains intact. Whatever political scenarios were built around an Alito vacancy can be shelved — at least for now.
The announcement landed on a Friday, which is when this kind of news often drops. The more revealing chapter came earlier. On the last day of opinions in June, NPR published a story declaring that Alito was retiring. For a few minutes, the country treated it as fact. Then it vanished. The Court said there had been no announcement. NPR pulled the piece and apologized.
The explanation was almost as messy as the error. Veteran correspondent Nina Totenberg said she misheard a remark about “retirement announcements” — Chief Justice John Roberts was noting staff retirements, not Alito’s — and did not catch the plural. Editors then posted a prewritten retirement obituary they had been holding for the day the news was actually true. Totenberg later called it the worst professional mistake of her career and apologized to Alito on air. A public-editor column and a correction-to-the-correction followed. A false story produced a false account of the false story, and then another fix.
Alito has never been an easy target to move. He writes the opinions his critics most dislike and the dissents that refuse to soften the point. He has also treated ethics campaigns, protests at justices’ homes, and media pile-ons as political operations rather than solemn institutional hygiene. None of that produced a resignation. In the Journal interview he was equally blunt about conservative pressure to step aside so President Trump could install a younger successor: the talk is “a reminder of mortality,” like “vultures” circling. Life tenure, he said, comes with that. Justices, he added, are not interchangeable parts.
He also rejected the charge that he times votes to look independent of Trump. “I vote in every case the way I think the case should be decided,” he said. A high correlation with the White House is fine. Zero correlation is fine. What he will not do is split the difference so commentators can call him balanced.
NPR burned the retirement scoop before Alito had to deny it. He is still on the Court. The majority is still 6–3. The next term will proceed without the vacancy so many people had already written into the script.
