Wednesday, July 11, 2018

SCOTUS, one of the most effective Checks on the Executive

On Monday, Mr. Trump announced his pick for SCOTUS to fill Justice Kennedy's seat, with Judge Brett Kavanaugh. At this point, assuming that Judge Kavanaugh gets seated (which he likely will), the Trump Presidency, despite some truly bad decisions on the part of the Executive, will be an overall win. Now, I'm still rather displeased with the president on several issues, and I'm not planning on voting for him, but most of his less exemplary decisions are entirely executive in nature, meaning that they only last as long as an executive wants them to. The judiciary on the other hand, can be shaped for a generation, and so far, his picks have been solid. Moreover, his one seated pick so far, Gorsuch, has already once ruled in ways that limit  the Trump administration. A good SCOTUS is a major limiter on executive shenanigans, and so far Trump has strengthened, rather than weakened, that limiter.
Just don't expect me to be happy when SCOTUS has to remind the executive branch that the Constitution, not the personal beliefs of the executive or of the bureaucrats involved, is the supreme law of the land.

Saturday, July 7, 2018

Justice Kennedy's retirement

The current Democrat woes over SCOTUS is entirely of their own design. So far, they've had French flatulence blow up in their faces when the Biden rule got invoked to prevent Merrick Garland from sitting on SCOTUS, then again when Reid's filibuster reform got extended to SCOTUS nominations to allow Gorsuch to take a seat. Now, because it benefited them to have the Biden rule only apply to presidential elections, they're about to get another Trump appointee to SCOTUS (hopefully a strict constructionist, originalist, or textualist). It's even worse for them because Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer didn't retire under Obama, when they could've at least ensured that it would only take one justice to tip the balance back in their favor. From here out, Ginsberg and Breyer have to survive until the next president takes office - two to six years from now - at an age where death can happen suddenly and without warning for a variety of reasons, in order to prevent Trump from creating a SCOTUS that would be almost impossible for any single president to flip.
I'm not exactly full of sorrow over their mistakes.