If you didn't believe me then, perhaps you'll believe me now. If you don't believe me now, you most certainly will by the time the 2020 presidential election comes along.
Yesterday, Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the Supreme Court. This will make for the second Justice appointed by the current president (after the first seat was held open for eight months prior to the election by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell). This appointment is going to have a monumental effect on the court. The rules now require only 50 votes to confirm a new Justice. Republicans have 51 votes. Trump can seat whoever he wants. We've seen him already seat Gorsuch; we know the type of man he will seat next. (Anybody want to bet against me on it being a man?)
To be realistic, Anthony Kennedy was only a "center justice" in that the Supreme Court was already so far to the right politically that old-school conservatism (of the type that has no place in current American politics) looked centrist by comparison. Just this term, Kennedy's vote on the Court helped hobble the power of unions (if you think teacher pay is unjust now, just wait), upheld race-motivated gerrymandering (in a case so clear cut that if it doesn't violate the Constitution, then truly nothing does), and endorsed the so-called "Muslim ban" (anyone who thinks Trump won't treat that as a blank check for more of the same, want to go double or nothing?).
But to be certain, Kennedy's replacement will be even farther to the right, because Kennedy occasionally reached across the aisle. He was the fifth vote holding in place two particular lines of cases. First, abortion rights. Everybody has heard of Roe vs. Wade. Fewer people know that it's already not "the law of the land," amended considerably in Casey vs. Planned Parenthood, and abridged further in additional Supreme Court cases that allowed significant restrictions on access to abortions. But to some extent, abortions have remained largely attainable in the U.S., with Kennedy keeping a foot in the door. Second is gay rights. Kennedy was the fifth vote to strike down criminal prosecution of homosexual intimacy, and later to legalize same-sex marriage.
That's all going to come under attack in the next few years. By the next presidential election in 2020, the nationwide right to abortion will be either eroded by further restrictions that allow some states to shutter even more locations, or by an outright pass allowing states to criminalize it if they want to. In that same time frame, there will be a ruling out of the Supreme Court allowing people to refuse service to discriminate against LGBT people on religious grounds (fully; not in the "well, this one baker gets a pass because one commissioner said mean things to him" sort of way).
This is why "principled conservatives" have put up with the Trump circus so far. For exactly this. Anything they might not have liked about Trump was worth putting up with to have a Republican in place to nominate new Supreme Court Justices. The Supreme Court is now this close to being staunchly conservative for a generation. And frankly, anyone hoping otherwise is drawing to an inside straight at this point. If either Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Clarence Thomas dies or retires while a Republican is president, then the Supreme Court will be irrevocably, intensely conservative, for fully 20 to 30 years.
This is not a call to action. The time for action was two years ago. Now there is nothing you can do. There's nothing I can do but type out this rant in the hopes that it will make me feel better.
It didn't, really. Damn.
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