Demand Justice, a liberal organization, has mounted robust efforts to block President Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court in the past, but never before a vacancy existed.
For now, none of the nine Supreme Court justices have announced plans to retire, and Mr. Trump has no looming opportunity to keep stocking the court with younger conservative justices.
That isn’t stopping Demand Justice from preparing a multimillion-dollar effort to oppose potential Trump Supreme Court appointees before they happen — with a warning that Mr. Trump could be replacing two justices this year.
The preparations come at a moment when Democrats are feeling optimistic about their ability to break Republican control of Congress, and when there is growing fear in some corners of the party that Mr. Trump will seek to install loyalist justices who could sit on the court for decades.
Josh Orton, the president of Demand Justice, said the project would cost $3 million to start and $15 million more if vacancies occurred and Mr. Trump nominated a successor to the court — most likely for Clarence Thomas or Samuel A. Alito Jr., the two oldest justices. Justice Thomas is 77 years old, and Justice Alito is 76.
If Democrats were to win control of the Senate in the November elections — they need to flip at least four Republican-held seats to do so — Mr. Trump would face steep odds of getting nominees confirmed during the remainder of his term. If a Democrat were to succeed him as president, Justices Thomas and Alito would both be in their 80s by the time a potential Republican president could appoint a successor.
“If you think that Trump is willing to leave two of the three justices he thinks are most loyal on the court in their 80s past when he leaves office, you are not paying attention,” Mr. Orton said in an interview Thursday. “There is no way that Donald Trump and Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito would ever commit the fundamental miscalculation about power that we saw from Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Barack Obama and we as a movement.”
Justice Ginsburg rebuffed calls to retire while Mr. Obama was president and Senate Democrats held a majority. After battling cancer, she died during Mr. Trump’s first term in office and was replaced on the court by Amy Coney Barrett.
Mr. Orton’s team aims to range across the Democratic ideological spectrum. It includes veterans of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s White House; an adviser to the super PAC for Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York; Michael Pratt and Colleen Coffey, former finance directors of the Democratic National Committee; and the pollsters Anna Greenberg and Cornell Belcher.
Demand Justice plans to tie all Republicans running for office this year to a potential Trump Supreme Court selection. If all Senate Democrats opposed a Trump nomination, four Republican senators would need to break with Mr. Trump to block a Supreme Court nominee. Mr. Orton said as many as six Republican senators could do so under the right political conditions.
“If Trump is handed another Supreme Court vacancy, we must be cleareyed and ready to make it an uphill battle,” said Ezra Levin, a co-executive director of Indivisible, a liberal group that is a partner in the Demand Justice effort. “This will be a defining political battle, and we intend to make sure the stakes are clear to everyone.”
Mr. Orton said he aimed to frame a Supreme Court nomination fight less on traditional Democratic issues and more about a nominee having greater loyalty to Mr. Trump than to the country.
In February, Demand Justice released a report that concluded that all 37 of Mr. Trump’s nominees for lower court judgeships last year had given “dishonest or misleading” answers about the 2020 election and the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Last week, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, posted a montage of Trump judicial nominees failing to answer the question of who won the 2020 election or whether the Capitol was attacked on Jan. 6.
Mr. Orton said his research into potential Trump choices for the Supreme Court would fall into three broad categories: conservative judges on lower courts; political allies and elected officials; and a group of committed Trump loyalists that he described with a vulgar equivalent for “screw you.”
“He’s going to want to appoint his Harriet Miers,” Mr. Orton said, referring to former President George W. Bush’s White House counsel, who in 2005 withdrew her Supreme Court nomination after a flurry of Republican opposition. “He’s going to want someone he knows, someone who has given him advice that he trusts. Someone that knows him personally and he feels understands him and that he can call for years to come personally to his aid.”
Reid J. Epstein is a Times reporter covering campaigns and elections from Washington.
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