President-elect Donald Trump was already working on a short list of potential Supreme Court nominees during his campaign to prepare for vacancies in his coming term.
“I’m going to be putting together a list of judges — great judges — a list of about 20. I think it’s important to reveal who your Supreme Court justices will be,” Mr. Trump told The Times last year.
Conservatives are also preparing in case of a high court vacancy.
An appointment to the Supreme Court would be Mr. Trump’s fourth. He nominated three justices during his first term as president.
Mr. Trump might be able to add five justices to the high court if the two most senior Republican appointees, besides Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., choose to retire.
Justice Clarence Thomas, 76, has served on the court for 33 years. President George H.W. Bush appointed him in 1991. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., 74, has served for 18 years. He was nominated by President George W. Bush in 2006.
“If Justices Thomas and Alito retire while Trump is president, their replacements are likely to share their views, so I doubt the Court’s jurisprudence would change much,” said Stuart Banner, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Replacing the Republican appointees would not change the court’s 6-3 conservative majority.
Some court watchers note that Justices Thomas and Alito have been consistently more conservative in their decisions than Mr. Trump’s appointments: Justices Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
“Most researchers would agree that Trump’s three picks to the Court are more moderate conservative votes than Alito or Thomas, and I’d guess that there is a lot of pressure from hard-line conservatives to pick nominees with a more aggressive conservative voting record,” said Adam Feldman, Supreme Court scholar and creator of the Empirical SCOTUS blog.
“Trump’s relationship with the Federalist Society and the Society’s impact on his nominees will likely play a large role on his candidates. Ultimately, if Alito or Thomas retire, the bigger impact will be longevity on the Court. It is unlikely he can find any nominees that are more conservative. If [Justice Sonia] Sotomayor or [Justices Elena] Kagan or [Ketanji Brown] Jackson leave the court, the impact will obviously be much greater,” he added in an email.
Justice Sotomayor, an Obama appointee, is 70.
Chief Justice Roberts will turn 70 this month. Justice Elena Kagan, also an Obama appointee, is 64.
If Mr. Trump makes five appointments, he will be the first president to do so in more than 60 years.
The last president with five high court appointments was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who served from 1953 to 1961.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt had eight appointments, William Howard Taft had five, Abraham Lincoln had five, Andrew Jackson had six, and George Washington had 10, Mr. Banner said.
“Washington got to appoint the whole first batch of justices, and Roosevelt was president longer than anyone else. Congress enlarged the court while Jackson and Lincoln were president, so they each got to appoint one justice to a new seat,” he said.
Presidents Reagan and Nixon each had four high court appointments, Mr. Feldman said.
• Alex Swoyer can be reached at aswoyer@washingtontimes.com.
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