Op-Ed by Attorney General Charity Clark
Our choice for President of the United States this November will have far-reaching impacts on the U.S. Supreme Court and our entire judicial system. Voters should be asking themselves: what kind of country do you want to live in? What kind of future do you want to leave for the next generation? Because the judicial choices made by President Trump during his first term present a clear – and concerning – picture of what another four years would mean for the bench and for our country.
In his single term, President Trump appointed a staggering 226 federal judges, all of whom are entitled to serve as federal judges for life. Fifty-four of his appointments were made to the federal appeals courts, which sit just below the U.S. Supreme Court (for comparison, President Obama appointed about the same – fifty-five appeals court judges – in his two terms). Those courts often have the final say in interpreting our laws, including the Constitution. Critically, President Trump also appointed three Justices to the U.S. Supreme Court in his single term. The appointments of those Justices – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – have formed a conservative supermajority that has reshaped much of the American legal landscape. With lifetime appointments, Justices Gorsuch (56 years old), Kavanaugh (59 years old) and Barrett (52 years old) could continue to serve for literally decades.
The profound impacts of a president’s judicial appointments can be seen in, for example, President Trump’s handiwork in ensuring Americans were stripped of their right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Dobbs overturned nearly 50 years of legal precedent, dismantled women’s rights to make our own healthcare decisions, and clouded and confused the future of reproductive liberty for millions of Americans.
The Dobbs decision is perhaps the most well-known folly of Trump’s Supreme Court, but, unfortunately, there are many others. In this past U.S. Supreme Court term alone, the conservative majority: ruled that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution in most situations (Trump v. United States); struck down a ban on rifles with “bump stocks,” which in 2017 were used by a shooter in Las Vegas to kill over 60 people and injure over 850 more (Garland v. Cargill); allowed racial gerrymandering so long as it also supports partisan political goals (Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP); and made it harder for the EPA and many other federal agencies to protect consumers, investors, and the environment by throwing out a decades-old precedent under which the federal courts deferred to the technical expertise of those agencies (Loper-Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo).
The impacts of Trump’s appointments are being felt in the lower federal courts as well. Just take a look at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, where six Trump appointees have pushed an already conservative court to the extreme. In a couple of instances, the Fifth Circuit’s rulings were too conservative even for our ultra conservative U.S. Supreme Court. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Fifth Circuit decisions allowing dangerous domestic abusers to continue possessing firearms (United States v. Rahimi) and concluding that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was not constitutional (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association of America). In cases dealing with misinformation on social media (Missouri v. Biden) and our right to reproductive liberty (Texas v. Becerra and FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine), the U.S. Supreme Court blocked Fifth Circuit decisions on technical grounds but those issues likely will return with a second Trump administration.
Now is the time to shape our future in a way that reflects our values. It’s time to decide whether stripping Americans of their reproductive freedom, denying states the right to enact gun safety measures, ignoring the expertise of government agencies, and allowing misinformation to spread is the future we want for ourselves and for our children – and vote accordingly.