President-elect Trump’s White House victory has created tussles among conservatives and liberals alike over whether the Supreme Court’s oldest justices should retire.

Trump’s election has raised public anticipation that two of the court’s leading conservatives, Justice Clarence Thomas, 76, and Justice Samuel Alito, 74, may step down.

Although the incoming Republican-controlled Senate could glide their Trump-nominated replacements to confirmation, the speculation has drawn admonishment from a key figure in the conservative legal movement, who called the talk “crass.”

The election has meanwhile renewed fretting among some Democrats that the court could be headed to a 7-2 conservative majority as President Biden’s term nears a close with Justice Sonia Sotomayor, 70, the court’s most senior liberal, showing no sign of stepping aside.

During his first term, Trump remade the court by appointing three justices who have delivered considerable conservative victories, including overturning constitutional abortion protections, contracting the power of federal agencies and expanding gun rights.

In his second term, Trump could become the first president since Dwight Eisenhower to appoint a majority of sitting Supreme Court justices, if Thomas and Alito do in fact retire.

“We're going to see again younger originalist judges who really respect the structural constraints of our Constitution,” said Kimberly Hermann, executive director of the conservative Southeastern Legal Foundation.

Ed Whelan, a conservative legal commentator who clerked at the Supreme Court, wrote on his Substack........

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