Vox’s Ian Millhiser has a story up today which suggests a course of action which has zero chance of actually happening. He wants Justices Sotomayor and Kagan to retire before Joe Biden leaves office. All of this of course is based on the example of the late Justice Ginsburg who made the mistake of waiting too long.

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?

As we all know this was traumatizing for many on the left and especially now in the light of the overturning of Roe v Wads. As Millhiser sees it, Kagan and Sotomayor may be making the same mistake if they don’t exit now because it’s possible they won’t get another chance for many years to come.

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 most shocking part of Millhiser’s story isn’t that he’s recommending two relatively young progressives resign from the court. The really shocking part is that he could be right.

Progressive strategist David Shor has been warning about this problem for more than a year.

At the heart of Shor’s frenzied work is the fear that Democrats are sleepwalking into catastrophe. Since 2019, he’s been building something he calls “the power simulator.” It’s a model that predicts every House and Senate and presidential race between now and 2032 to try to map out the likeliest future for American politics. He’s been obsessively running and refining these simulations over the past two years. And they keep telling him the same thing.

We’re screwed in the Senate, he said. Only he didn’t say “screwed.”

In 2022, if Senate Democrats buck history and beat Republicans by four percentage points in the midterms, which would be a startling performance, they have about a 50-50 chance of holding the majority. If they win only 51 percent of the vote, they’ll likely lose a seat — and the Senate.

But it’s 2024 when Shor’s projected Senate Götterdämmerung really strikes. To see how bad the map is for Democrats, think back to 2018, when anti-Trump fury drove record turnout and handed the House gavel back to Nancy Pelosi. Senate Democrats saw the same huge surge of voters. Nationally, they won about 18 million more votes than Senate Republicans — and they still lost two seats. If 2024 is simply a normal year, in which Democrats win 51 percent of the two-party vote, Shor’s model projects a seven-seat loss, compared with where they are now.

Of course we all know now that Democrats really did “buck history” in 2022 and actually gained a seat in the Senate. That makes the worst case for Democrats (a GOP supermajority in the Senate) less likely but still not impossible. What it doesn’t do is change the fact that the GOP will very likely win the Senate in two years and could hold it for as long as a decade.

If predicting the future were easy no one would ever be surprised. So I don’t think Sotomayor or Kagan are likely to retire next year based on predictions about what might be happening a decade from now. Nevertheless, there’s a chance that Millhiser and Shor are right and that Democrats may come to regret it.