The US Supreme Court: Trump’s big chance
It’s not often that the retirement of an 81-year-old man changes the face of a nation. But the announcement by Justice Anthony Kennedy that he is to stand down from the US Supreme Court has done just that, said Justin Webb in The Times. His exit spells “the slow death of liberal America”. It means that Donald Trump can now select a judge who will ensure that the Court has a rock-solid 5-4 conservative majority. Stand by for a bonfire of all the liberal rulings that over the past 40 years have thrilled people in San Francisco and dismayed the folks back in Columbus, Nebraska. We could soon see the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling which established abortion rights across America, and gay marriage rights; and the right to take account of ethnicity in university admissions could go the same way. And it will be for the long term. Presidents serve for eight years at most; but Supreme Court judges last for decades.
This is indeed “a dark moment in the history of the court and the nation”, said The New York Times. It’s not that Kennedy was a great liberal: when appointed by President Reagan in 1988, he was seen as a conservative. But he moderated his reactionary tendencies, and ended up a maverick who played “a critical tempering role” in a court “increasingly entrenched along political lines”, taking stands to defend same-sex marriage and a woman’s right to choose.
How typical of those on the Left to greet Kennedy’s retirement with “apocalyptic hysteria”, said Stephen Daisley in The Spectator. What they’re really complaining about is the democratic process: they can’t get a majority on issues like abortion at the ballot box, so they’ve come to rely on Supreme Court judgments to “do the heavy lifting for them”. But don’t forget Trump’s favoured candidate has yet to be approved by the Senate, said Molly Kiniry in The Sunday Telegraph. And if Republican senators lose their slim majority in the midterm elections, that won’t happen. So Trump will do all he can to ram his choice through the nomination process before November. Whatever happens, one thing’s sure: the selection of the next judge “will almost certainly have more impact on America’s future than the next presidential election”.