P.J. BUCHANAN: IS TRUMP COURT IN THE MAKING?

P.J. BUCHANAN: IS TRUMP COURT IN THE MAKING?

IN PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH: HTTP://WWW.CONOPSBEGONE.BLOGSPOT.COM - SAT.. JULY 14/2018

 

    "If Mich McConnell's Senate can confirm his new nominee by the Supreme Court. President Donald Trump may have completed the capture of all branches of the U.S. government for the Republican Party...

 

    For liberalism's great strategic ally and asset of 60 years, the judicial  dictatorship erected by Earl Warren and associates, may be about to fall. ... Among the challenges Warren's court succeeded in imposing. The DE-CHRISTIANIZATION of all public institutions in America. (Recall the Supreme's court decision on Prayer in the schools.) The social war of the 1970s over forced busing for racial balance by the public schools.

 

    The creation, ex nihilo, of new constitutional rights, first to an abortion, and then to homosexuality and same-sex marriage. ... There will not likely be any sudden and radical rollback of changes wrought in six decades. For some of those changes have become embedded in the public consciousness as new normal and will endure.

    Roe v. Wade may be challenged. But even if overturned, states like New York and California, which had liberalized abortion laws before Roe, are not likely to re-criminalize it. Affirmative action, however, racial discrimination against white males to promote diversity, may be on the chopping block.

    Why did it take until Trump to restore constitutionalism to the Supreme Court, when the Warren Court had been a blazing issue since the 1950s and Republicans held the presidency for 28 years from 1968 to 2016, and managed to elevate 12 justice? ...

 

    Every GOP president save Bush II, has appointed Justices who grew to believe had a right to remake America to conform to their image of the ideal democracy. And they so acted. Said Ike ruefully on his retirement: Two of my worst mistakes are sitting up there on the Supreme Court. The two were Warren, who, as California's governor, had pushed to put Japanese-Americans in concentration camps in World War II, and William Brennan, the most radical justice to sit in over half century. ....

 

    Three of four Nixon's justices would vote to Roe v. Wade in 1973. Harry Blackmun became the author of Roe. Nixon's fourth nominee, William Rehnquist, was his best, a brilliant jurist whom Reagan himself would elevate to chief justice. Gerald Ford's sole nominee, John Paul Stevens, confirmed 97-0 in the Senate, turned left soon after his confirmation to join Blackmum.

 

    Reagan named Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman, and Scalia. But when his effort to elevate Judge Robert Bork failed, he turned to Anthony Kennedy of California, whose seat Trump is filling today.  Over thirty years, Kennedy's vote proved decisive in 5-4 decisions to uphold Roe, to discover homosexuality as a constitutional right, and to raise same-sex unions to the legal level of traditional marriage. (He is a Catholic-in-name-only person.)

 

    George H.W. Bush's first choice was David Souter, who also turned left join the liberal block. Bush I got it right on his second try in 1991, naming the constitutional Clarence Thomas. As for George W. Bush, he chose John Roberts as Chief Justice to succeed Rehnquist and then Sam Alito as associate.

Thus, of 15 justices Republican Presidents have names since World War II, five - Warren, Brennan, Blackmun, Stevens and Souter - became liberal activists. Kennedy and Sandra O'Connor, both Reagan choices, became swing justices and voted with the court's liberals on critical social issues.  ....

 

    Of seven justices named by LBJ, Clinton and Obama, every one - Thurgood Marshall,Arthur Goldberg, Abe Fortas, Ruth Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor -turned out to be predictable and consistently liberal. ...

 

    It was Trump's 2016 pledge to draw his nominees to the high court from a list o 20 judges and scholars supplied by the Federalist Society that reassured conservatives and helped him unite the party and get him elected. On the issue of judicial nominees and justices to the Supreme Court, Trump has kept his word. The next Supreme Court appointment may one day be called the Trump Court."

George H. Kubeck