Topping off the list of ways Trump has inflicted damage to our country is making good on his campaign promise to fill the courts with conservative judges. Most people understood this promise to mean judges who were skeptical of environmental regulations, less zealous in the defense of civil rights, and more sensitive to pro-life arguments. Trump has placed more top-level judges and at a faster rate than any previous president, and most are younger, more ideologically committed, and less diverse than their peers. In fact, he has succeeded in filling 25% of the federal bench. While preparing to fill dozens of district court vacancies, Trump has also installed 51 district court judges at the circuit court level, about 30% of the total. Finally, out of the nine lifetime supreme court judges, Trump has already appointed Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, who was narrowly confirmed after the Senate turned a blind eye to credible accusations of sexual assault by Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez.
Now, in a most ironic twist of fate, appellate court judge, Amy Coney Barrett, an extremely conservative “originalist” and member of the secretive Catholic group People of Praise, is expected to be confirmed to replace liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsberg just two weeks before election day. While the official nomination did occur 24 hours after Ginsberg’s funeral, Trump didn’t even have the decency to wait until the end of the Jewish mourning period to start the discussion or to pay his respects to the trailblazer for women and staunch supporter of civil rights while she lay in state — either outside the U.S. Supreme Court or in the National Statuary Hall of the Capitol. For Trump, there is no high road, merely an opportunity to win. He acts not because it is right but rather because he can.
The hypocrisy by the Trump and Republican Party ramming through the nomination is as unmistakable as Trump’s orange hair (for which he paid $70,000 to maintain according to income tax figures uncovered by the New York Times), having refused to hold hearings to even consider Obama’s nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, ten months before the 2016 election. But why this really matters so much is that we are a nation of laws. We are a democracy, but our democratic process is designed to set limits and establish legal oversight that is supposed to reflect our values at a national level. That is one of the reasons that, historically, presidents — particularly democratic ones — nominate moderate judges, whose views are not unmistakably partisan, so that the approval process is based on core qualifications of fairness, mental acumen, and a willingness to entertain both sides of an argument based on the merits. Unfortunately, with a disproportionate number of individuals — carefully vetted by jurists to the Federalist Society and reflecting Trump’s elitist conservative views — now representing our judicial system, this is no longer likely to occur, and the American public will not be represented by a jury of their peers. We will be subject to the extreme ideology of a hand-selected minority, and many of the rights and values we hold dear are in jeopardy.
What’s at stake are things like access to reproductive healthcare, voting rights, and protections of those most vulnerable, including the disabled, victims of police abuse, and asylum seekers. Additionally, we could see more support for a wealth test for green card applicants, federal funding for a border wall, restrictions on transgender individuals, and the absolution of gay marriage. The biggest targets for Republicans, however, include overturning a woman’s federally mandated constitutional right to chose (joining only six other countries worldwide where abortion is illegal), killing the Affordable Care Act (which would leave 23 million citizens without health care), expanding “religious liberty” rights to discriminate against LGBTQ individuals. Lastly, it’s possible that the 2013 Voting Rights Act could be rescinded and, worse, the Supreme Court could be called upon to intervene on a contested 2020 election based on Trump’s repeated false claims of voter fraud from mail-in ballots. If that were to happen, and an ethically-challenged, sociopathic Trump were to retain control after losing the popular vote a second time, the damage to our nation’s democracy and unity might be irreparable.
