As I was preparing to shred the latest issue of Rolling Stone Magazine*, I noticed a rather alarming headline: Inside Trump’s Judicial Takeover. Well, it’s alarming to Rolling Stone, to be sure. So I gave it a read, expecting to drink deeply of the leftist tears that have become sustenance to me in the last 24 months.
I was not disappointed in the author’s wailing. Because I have not been disappointed in Trump’s judicial picks.
“Whatever one wants to say about President Trump, he was very explicit about which judges he wanted, and he’s gone about appointing them,” says Michael Gerhardt, a law professor at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. “He made a promise and they’re** keeping it.”
The Left knows what’s at stake. Their anguish at Kavanaugh’s confirmation is evidence enough. As the article puts it: “…taken to its logical extreme, an originalist reading of the Constitution could mean a country without same-sex marriage, federal child-labor laws, or the Americans with Disabilities Act.” It would also mean a nation without Roe, without Lawrence v. Texas, without the Lemon Test, and without an hundred other impositions of judicial preference on the states and nation. A Trump court could wind up, in their words, “destroying the administrative state.”
Oh, the horror! Well, at least you can see the horror from the point of view of an ideology that has relied on activist courts for nearly all of its so-called progress.
While a healthy skepticism on the right is certainly warranted***, the wailing on the left is evidence that at long last, we might have found a Republican who has the stones to get the job done. He has superfluous backbone to lend to his party to get the judges through. He has the intestinal fortitude to stand behind his picks when every other Republican would have withdrawn them.
In short, if the judiciary is packed over the next 6 years with young, right-wing ideologues, it will be primarily due to Trump’s foresight and bullheadedness. And such a result would be, in the words of newly-based Majority Leader Cocaine Mitch, “the most lasting impact Trump could have.”
The attempts of the left to preemptively de-legitimize the court system means that they believe that Trump is going to have exactly that impact. And for my part, I am glad to see the left burn their own toys to keep them out of our hands. Mostly because we don’t need them, and you can only burn them once.
Trump’s judicial picks do not change the economic trajectory our nation is on. We are headed for a financial reckoning and Trump has done nothing to avert that. But he may have – purposely and forcefully and where no other Republican could – sacked and conquered a major stronghold of the Left, the federal courts, and through that changed our social trajectory.
It’s too early to tell whether Trump and his GOP will be able to ultimately save the republic. But if we are going to go into a period of dissolution, of devolution, of restructuring the relationship between states and feds, maybe even of people and their money, then it’s far better to do it with a right-wing court system than a left-wing one.
For that reason alone, here’s to looking forward to Rolling Stone tears over the next half dozen years, and maybe longer.
* I don’t know why I get it. By that I don’t mean, “I don’t why I purchased a subscription,” because I didn’t. I literally don’t know why it comes to my house. I have never opened an issue before tonight.
** “They” being the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation.
*** After all, the GOP has been just a vote or two short of balancing the budget for generations, at least in their telling.
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