The Justice Sotomayor retirement discourse got me wondering. I knew that Justice O'Connor retired 18 years before she passed away, strange to think she outlived RBG. I did not know about Justice James F. Byrnes who lived a full 30 years after retiring. But it gets even stranger. Byrnes was a Justice for only 15 months! He left the court to head Roosevelt's Office of Economic Stabilization, a wartime price control bureau. Not sure if he is an anomaly or if SCOTUS was very different back then. How do you give up such a prestigious and powerful lifetime role so quickly for something entirely new and unknown? Granted it was also WWII, crazy times. And Roosevelt's vision for a post-war planned economy might have made the OES job appear to be the bigger deal.
@valkenburgh Roosevelt was the biggest supreme court despot. Probably wanted someone that would vote his way.