What #NeverHillary Did To America's Future
Cynthia Tucker
July 1, 2018 4:25 am
It matters less, now, if President Donald J. Trump serves only one term. It matters less if he is impeached. It matters less if Robert Mueller indicts him for colluding with a foreign power.
With the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy from the U.S. Supreme Court, Trump is a hairbreadth away from sealing his legacy as one of the most influential (if petty, crude, divisive, corrupt and antidemocratic) presidents in American history.
It is hard to overestimate the magnitude of this development. Trump has promised to appoint another hardcore conservative, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his minions will roll right over Senate Democrats to confirm him (or her). That jurist will likely be in his or her 40s or 50s and serve for decades.
That strongly suggests that for the rest of my life — and through a considerable part of my child’s adult life — the nation’s highest court will be a bastion of ultra-right doctrine, hostile to progressive causes of all sorts. That court will likely kill off reproductive rights, starve unions, look askance at affirmative action, eviscerate voting rights and abuse criminal defendants. It will coddle violent police officers, kowtow to corporations and re-write the First Amendment, bulldozing Thomas Jefferson’s famed “wall of separation between church and state.”
This is a huge victory for the forces of retrenchment. Conservatives are much better than liberals at playing the long game, and rich political players on the right have been plotting to remake the court in their own image for decades now. Even before Kennedy’s announcement (and with Kennedy’s assistance), the high court had shifted rightward. Just this summer, the court has weakened reproductive rights, upheld Trump’s hateful, anti-Muslim travel ban and hammered public sector unions. It aided and abetted homophobes with a ruling that sided with a baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.
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http://www.nationalmemo.com/what-neverhillary-did-to-americas-future/
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