Conservative Supreme Court Likely After Trump Win

Following any political skirmish in the Senate, the man or woman who replaces Scalia on the bench won’t change its balance of power.

What do we know about what kind of justice President-elect Trump would nominate?

If Trump is able to replace sitting liberal justices with more conservative ones, could they undo decisions such as Roe v. Wade?

“The Supreme Court has never recognized a fundamental right to engage in sexual activity outside of monogamous heterosexual marriage, let alone to engage in homosexual sodomy”, Pryor wrote. He has pledged to appoint pro-life justices as well as those who strongly support the second amendment right to bear arms.

But some liberals said they hoped that even a Supreme Court dominated by conservative justices, including ones on Trump’s list of 21 possible nominees vetted by conservative legal groups, could nonetheless serve as a restraint on Trump’s ambitions. The court has generally sided with the conservative position in cases on campaign finance, religious liberty and gun rights.

Specifics about what Trump wants to accomplish remain unclear, said Stephanos Bibas, director of the U.S. Supreme Court Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Obama nominated Merrick Garland, a respected moderate liberal and former prosecutor who is chief judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That could spell doom for some of Obama’s forays into areas such as health care, immigration and environmental protection.

Anticipating a Republican triumph in November, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decreed that because 2016 was an election year, the Senate must await the nominee of Obama’s successor. In a statement she reiterated that the “people deserved to be heard” and added that “a sizable majority of voters named lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court as one of the most important factors in their voting decision”.

Some people will vote for Donald Trump because they don’t like Hillary Clinton. Though Garland wasn’t as ideological a liberal as some nominees Obama might have chosen, Democrats believed – and Republican senators agreed – that he likely would be a reliable vote for the court’s liberal wing in cases with a high ideological profile.

The inability to access birth control easily – an issue that will be impacted not just by defunding Planned Parenthood but when Trump and the Republican Congress follow through on their promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which mandated no co-pay birth control in insurance programs – plus the likelihood that it will be almost impossible to get an abortion after 20 weeks will both have immediate effects on women. A Republican Senate rejected George W Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers as insufficiently reliable or qualified, and they would do the same thing in the highly unlikely event that Trump nominated a justice who doesn’t come from the Federalist Society wish list.

Lyle Denniston, Constitution Daily’s Supreme Court correspondent, explains why a transition to a truly different court may not come until after 2018, and why Justice Anthony Kennedy’s role could become greater. Our Constitution provides many more political checks on the court than the power to appoint new personnel – the problem is that Congress is loath to use them. “There will be an opportunity to move forward and expand rights, or an opportunity to shift the law backwards and turn the clock back on civil rights, workers’ rights, women’s rights, and immigrants’ rights”. The case is pending before an appeals court in Washington.

Even losing seats, Republicans still have majorities of 31-9 in the Senate and 85-40 in the House. She later called her comments “ill-advised”. All appear to be more conservative than Kennedy, the court’s longest-serving justice. The other three are Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justices Samuel A. Alito, Jr., and Clarence Thomas.

“He has not signaled these are issues that matter to him, but the question remains what if he hands over the Department of Justice to activists who do?”