It almost sounds like a bad joke: What did the 78-year-old male senator say to the 69-year-old female justice?

“RETIRE!”

That’s effectively what happened recently when U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut suggested that Sonia Sotomayor – the first Hispanic and third woman Supreme Court justice – retire so that President Joe Biden could appoint a younger and presumably healthier replacement.

Blumenthal is not alone. Fearing a repeat of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death in September 2020 — just weeks before Election Day — progressives such as Josh Barro, Mehdi Hasan and Nate Silver want to ensure that if Donald Trump does defeat Biden in November, he would not have another opportunity to replace a departed liberal justice with a young conservative ideologue.

If Sotomayor is indeed ill, she could justifiably choose to retire. But such calls are not clear-eyed assessments of the justice’s health. Blumenthal and the progressive columnists calling for Sotomayor’s retirement aren’t medical doctors who have reviewed the justice’s records.

Instead, in my view as a political scientist who studies the Supreme Court, these calls are gimmicks really designed to keep a seat on the Supreme Court in the hands of a liberal justice.

Don’t get me wrong. As I write in my new book, “A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other: The Deepening Divide Between the Justices and the People,” the increasingly long tenure of justices is a serious problem for American democracy. The confirmation of younger justices who stay far longer than they once did prevents the court’s membership from changing organically.

Consider, for example, a hypothetical I pose in my book. Justice Clarence Thomas once said that he intends to serve until he is 86 years old because, as he put it, “The liberals made my life miserable for 43 years, and I’m going to make their lives miserable for 43 years.”

If Thomas, who at 75 is the oldest sitting justice, is able to fulfill that promise and no younger justice leaves the court before him, the U.S. would not see another vacancy until 2034.

A court unchanged for 12 years would be unprecedented in American history. This is just one of the factors that has deepened the “democracy gap” between the justices and the people, which I define in the book as “the distance between the court and the electoral processes that endow it with democratic legitimacy.”

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