Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, 76, said he considered retiring this year, but that he would be serving another term despite Republicans‘ control of the Senate making for a smoother path to confirming a conservative replacement. Rumors had swirled in August after NPR published and then retracted an article claiming that Alito would…
Page A4From§Eachthe midnight edition — 3 October 2026
Alito calls overturning Roe 'courage,' then schedules his retirement around the Senate majority that confirms replacements.
As it ran on the front
I added it up this morning on the back of a parts-store receipt — a fan belt, two hose clamps, four quarts of the good oil, about three hundred and ten dollars I do not currently have — and underneath the number I wrote a word I can't stop turning over, courage, because a sitting Supreme Court justice used it on national television this week, and I wanted to see it next to a bill I actually have to pay.
Before I get into the Justice, I want to walk back through what's already sitting on this page, because the story doesn't reset just because the dateline did. In September, on a Sunday, ICE shoots a DoorDash driver named Wilber Rafael Garces Perez during a traffic stop in Austin — the Washington Examiner has that part. By Monday he's in federal custody, the bullet still lodged near his spine. Eight days later, prosecutors charge him, not the officer who fired, with assaulting the man who shot him. The bullet comes out eleven days after the stop. In the Senate, Republicans block a bill that would have put school bus stops off-limits to the same agency. In Pennsylvania and in Texas, people turn out, saying it has to stop — Common Dreams has that quote, not me. I'm bringing it back up because the court that made the law under which that stop happened has a seat on it belonging to a man who went on television this same week and reached for a different word for a different kind of nerve.…
…(cont) Here's what I do instead of fixing the belt. I lay the tools out on the bench in the order I'm going to need them — the eight-dollar ratchet and the forty-dollar one do the same job, so order is the only thing that separates them. I laid Justice Alito's interview out the same way. I wrote this down: he was asked, on CBS, whether there was a particular decision that took the word I already wrote on that receipt this morning. Jan Crawford's question had it in there before he opened his mouth. His answer: "the leading example is Dobbs." Is that the order the transcript shows — the word offered first, in the question, and handed back in the answer? I checked it twice. That's what it says.
The part that took me longer to get through, I had to read twice. In the companion piece the Washington Examiner ran off the same tape, he says there's no perfect time to retire, but he'll serve another term — and the paper's own sentence sits right next to it: Republican control of the Senate right now makes for "a smoother path to confirming a conservative replacement." I wrote that phrase down twice to be sure I hadn't added anything. I hadn't. It's theirs.
Down at the corner store this week the lottery machine had a sign taped to it, "back soon," hand-written, no further explanation given. I think about timing more than before, now that the belt's overdue. Does the Examiner's own sentence put his decision to stay right next to Republican control of the Senate, the same sentence I copied into this notebook? I'm only reading back what's on the page.
Oh — before I let the notebook close for the week, one more thing. On the same tape, same hour, same interviewer, this man uses the word from that receipt for the vote that ended Roe, on the record, by name. Then, asked about the vote on his own seat, he reaches for Senate math instead, and doesn't reach for that word again. So which one of those, side by side on the same page, gets to be called courage?
“Same man, same interview, same hour: the vote that ended Roe gets called courage, and the vote on his own replacement gets parked until Republicans still hold the Senate. That's not principle, that's a landlord timing a lease. The seat opens when the terms are guaranteed, not when the man is ready.”
“Look, a justice has every right to retire on his own schedule — the Constitution doesn't put a clock on it, and frankly waiting for a stable confirmation process is just good governance. He's not timing anything, he's just... aware of the Senate math. Did I just say a Supreme Court justice is managing the Senate math? Forget I said that.”
Earlier in this story
- ICE shoots man, charges him with assaulting the shooter, keeps access to school bus stops this week. By Sal · the supper edition, 2 October 2026
- ICE shoots man, charges him with assaulting the officer who shot him, removes the bullet eleven days later. By Sal · the early bird edition, 2 October 2026
The receipts
Justice Samuel Alito said he “thought about” retiring from the Supreme Court at the end of his last term following speculation about his potential retirement this year. In an interview with CBS News, chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford asked Alito if he considered retiring in the face of “some pretty intense pressure from Republicans”
Justice Samuel Alito said his vote to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022 alongside the Supreme Court’s six conservative justices took “courage.” In a preview for his interview with CBS News, Alito was asked if there was a particular decision that took courage.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.