Two significant recent Supreme Court decisions — loosening some restrictions on American’s gun owners and restricting abortions for the nation’s women — represent the ultimate impact of Donald Trump’s narrow 2016 election victory over Hillary Clinton.
They also represent the success of Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s cynical manipulation of Senate confirmation procedures. He kept a Democratic president from installing a justice in the last year of his presidency but enabled a Republican to install one as the nation’s voters were poised to oust him from office.
While wooing religious conservatives cool to his 2016 candidacy, Trump issued a list of conservative jurists he would consider for the Supreme Court, predicting they would overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortions. Similarly, he took increasingly fervent positions opposing any gun control measures, claiming they threatened the Second Amendment. His stance gained him strong political and financial support from the National Rifle Association and its allies.
The result is that, at a time when pervasive gun violence has prompted widespread support for increased limits on firearms ownership, a court with Trump’s three nominees further extended gun rights that it decided in 2008 were protected by the Second Amendment.
More dramatically, it repealed the constitutional right to an abortion that it established in 1973, though polls show most Americans favor its retention, some with limits.
These two decisions show a court more at odds with the public’s views than at any time in decades. They raise the question of whether public opposition to these decisions — especially the one curbing abortions — will help the Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections and the 2024 presidential race.
Critics face one overriding reality: It may take a long time before they can displace the court’s current six-justice conservative majority. With liberal Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement, the court’s oldest members, Republican nominees Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, are only in their early 70s.
Earlier this year, President Joe Biden gained Senate approval of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to succeed fellow liberal Breyer, the court’s oldest member.
But Republican recapture of the Senate in November’s election could enable McConnell to block Biden from filling any unexpected vacancies in the second two years of his term, like he blocked Barack Obama’s choice of Merrick Garland, now the attorney general, in 2016.
After that, the fate of the court — and many crucial issues facing the country — would depend on who wins the presidency and the Senate in 2024 — and beyond.
Last week’s decision might have been less sweeping had the Senate not confirmed Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett after liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020.
An entirely different scenario might have unfolded had Ginsburg yielded to entreaties from some Democrats to retire while Obama could name a like-minded successor.
The potential impact of her decision may have influenced the 83-year-old Breyer’s decision to step aside for Biden to name his successor.
By then, however, the Trump majority was in place.
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