Can we learn anything?
By 
Ian Milhiser has a piece noting the obvious: Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan should step down in what is likely the last chance in a while for a Democratic president to replace them:
We have now lived with the consequences of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s late-life arrogance for more than two years.
In 2014, President Barack Obama was in office and Democrats controlled the Senate, empowering them to confirm a new justice if Justice Ginsburg had left the Supreme Court. Ginsburg was a two-time cancer survivor in her 80s, the oldest member of a 5-4 Court where the right to an abortion — and perhaps even the right to vote in reasonably fair elections — teetered on a knife’s edge.
When she died in the final months of the Trump presidency, Ginsburg told her granddaughters her last desire: “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.” It amounted to nothing. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court, a seat that until recently belonged to the greatest women’s rights lawyer in American history, is now held by her ideological opposite.
Now, eight years later, the question arises: Should Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, 68 and 62, respectively, do what Ginsburg would not?
Both justices are much younger than Ginsburg was in 2014. There are no reports that either is in ill health (although Sotomayor has diabetes, she’s managed that condition nearly her entire life). Realistically, both justices could probably look forward to a decade or more of judicial service if they desire it. But even a mighty Supreme Court justice cannot overcome the merciless math facing Democrats in a malapportioned Senate that effectively gives extra representation to Republicans in small states.
Barring extraordinary events, Democrats will control the White House and the Senate for the next two years. They are unlikely to control it for longer than that. The 2024 Senate map is so brutal for Democrats that they would likely need to win a landslide in the national popular vote just to break even. Unless they stanch the damage then, some forecasts suggest that Democrats won’t have a realistic shot at a Senate majority until 2030 or 2032. And even those forecasts may be too optimistic for Democrats.
If Sotomayor and Kagan do not retire within the next two years, in other words, they could doom the entire country to live under a 7–2 or even an 8–1 Court controlled by an increasingly radicalized Republican Party’s appointees.
The replies to his tweet promoting the article, however, are mostly just depressing:
Sotomayor and Kagan need to think about retiringhttps://t.co/BX7Tch8sc9— Ian Millhiser (@imillhiser) December 21, 2022
My “favorite” is “well, why don’t Thomas and Alito retire instead?” I’m sure they’ll take that under advisement!
I understand that on one level it’s regrettable to be treated as a means rather than an end in yourself, but that’s also the responsibility you take when you accept a position of authority. Way too many liberals are still in denial about the consequences and implications of RBG’s disastrous failure of judgment in 2014.