BREAKING: Supreme Court Justice Kennedy Prepares to Make His Exit

We knew it was coming, but we didn’t know when.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has formally announced his intent to retire from the bench, after more than 30 years.

This is big.

Kennedy, who turns 82 in July, is the court’s longest-serving member and second-oldest justice after its leading liberal, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is 85.

Speculation that Kennedy was thinking about retiring started circling last term and gained steam this year. Some Republicans on Capitol Hill even claimed it was a definite, while others urged him to announce as soon as possible to give the GOP time to confirm his replacement before the midterm elections.

Justice Kennedy, considered a moderate, was nominated by former President Ronald Reagan and was confirmed in 1988.

He’s considered a moderate because his was the swing vote that allowed for such liberal atrocities as gay marriage and saving Obamacare, but sided with conservatives to limit campaign finance law and protect religious liberty.

What this means now, with a Republican president and Republican majorities in the House and Senate is that another conservative justice can be nominated.

Of course, whether that person makes it through confirmation is a gamble. Should the midterm elections in November go disastrously south for the Republican party, per the storied “blue wave,” there’s no way Democrats with a majority will allow a conservative to take that seat.

The Senate rules were changed in 2017 to require only a majority to confirm any Supreme Court nominee. Republicans have that for the time being.

The retirement is sad news for liberals, who had hoped that Kennedy would — as Ginsburg has vowed — remain on the job as long as physically possible.

He’s almost 82 years old. He’s done that.

“Personally, as the justice I clerked for, I just can’t imagine the Supreme Court without him,” said Daniel Epps, an associate professor of law at the Washington University School of Law.

“But as a citizen with my own views of and preferences for the law, I also want him to stay because I think he’s likely to reach better decisions than whoever will likely replace him.”

You won’t and can’t know until you see who is offered up.

President Trump currently has a short list and will likely be making an announcement soon.

In joining with conservatives earlier in June, giving the nod to a Colorado baker who refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. Kennedy pointed out that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had behaved badly towards the baker, and noted that the baker’s cakes were an “artistic expression of speech and religion,” protected by the First Amendment.

That’s due to the members of the laughably named Civil Rights Commission being unable to control their disdain and referring to the baker’s Christian religion as disgusting, and the equivalent of slavery or the Holocaust.

Kennedy said these types of disputes “must be resolved with tolerance, without undue disrespect to sincere religious beliefs, and without subjecting gay persons to indignities when they seek goods and services in an open market.”

And the thing about that case that is often missed by liberals attempting the claim victimhood: The couple was not restricted from buying any cake in the shop they liked. They just were not entitled to force him to design a cake for them, if his Christian beliefs would be violated.

Kennedy is set to retire on July 31.