How many SCOTUS appointments will Trump/Vance get by January 2029?
By 
I would put the over/under on that at around 2.5
Clarence Thomas will be 80 in 2028 and doesn’t seem to be in the greatest health. He’s already very far north of the cohort life expectancy for Black men born in 1948, not that he’s an average member of that cohort obviously. Chances he’s gone one way or another by 1/29? Fairly high.
Sam Alito will be 78, and he’s a guy lives to own the libs, so nothing would be sweeter for him than picking some protege barely half his age to torment the Godless Secularists. I can easily see him using his leverage to make that happen.
John Roberts will turn 74 a week after the end — I’m being optimistic here — of the second Trump administration. That’s still a spring chicken by the standards of our current gerontocracy, but I suspect he may be tiring of his increasingly unsuccessful attempt to play the role of Franz von Papen in this particular fascist drama. I don’t think he’ll resign, but I would hardly be surprised if he does.
Sonia Sotomayor. She will be 74, she has Type I diabetes, and she’s obviously committed to doing the full Ginsburg from here on out. Buena suerte, lo vas a necesitar.
There’s probably a 20-25%% chance that at least one of the other five justices either dies or turns out to have had a $250,000 gambling debt erased for valuable consideration (just spitballing here, not that something like this would actually make any difference, but isn’t pretty to think so?).
So the odds are excellent that the Supremes will add somebody who will make Thomas and Alito look like paragons of moderation and respectability. Aileen Cannon, the guy who was lynched at Stanford Law School but lived to tell about it, the guy who won’t hire Yale Law School grads because of all the communism . . . it promises to be a very special episode of the Trump Show.
Meanwhile the lower courts will be stacked with jurisprudential storm troopers, looking to do their part.
Possibly my favorite WWII story:
On the morning of 3 February 1945, Freisler was conducting a Saturday session of the People’s Court when United States Army Air Forces bombers attacked Berlin, led by the B-17 of Lieutenant Colonel Robert Rosenthal.[38] Government and Nazi Party buildings were hit, including the Reich Chancellery, the Gestapo headquarters, the Party Chancellery and the People’s Court. Hearing the air raid sirens, Freisler hastily adjourned the court and ordered that the prisoners be taken to an air raid shelter, but stayed behind to gather files before leaving. A bomb struck the court building at 11:08,[6] causing a partial internal collapse, and a masonry column came loose whilst Freisler was distracted by his documents. The column came crashing down on Freisler, causing him to be crushed and killed instantly. Due to the column collapsing, a large portion of the courtroom also landed on Freisler’s corpse.
The man who led the raid:
On his last combat mission on February 3, 1945, Robert Rosenthal, commanding the 418th, was part of a 2,500-plane raid against Berlin. His B-17G (s/n 44-8379), the lead bomber, suffered a direct flak hit which killed two of his crew. Although his plane was in flames, he continued to the target to drop his payload, then stayed with the plane until after the rest of the crew had bailed out, just before it exploded at an altitude of only about 1,000 feet (300 m). He broke his arm upon landing and was confronted at gunpoint by Red Army soldiers. Rosenthal identified himself as not German by yelling “Americanski! Coca-Cola! Lucky Strike! Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin!” which worked, as the English/American terms were popular enough to be recognized by non-English speaking Soviets who helped him again return to duty.[8][9][10] Rosenthal would earn the Distinguished Service Cross for this mission. Among the buildings hit in the raid was the “People’s Court”, killing the court’s president, notorious “hanging judge” Roland Freisler. Freisler was an attendee of the Wannsee Conference, which formalised plans for the “Final Solution to the Jewish question“.[11]
After the war, Rosenthal served as an assistant to the U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, where he interrogated the former head of the German Air Force, Hermann Göring and Wilhelm Keitel, former head of the German Armed Forces High Command Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW).[12]