Trump’s election could secure a conservative majority on the Supreme Court for decades

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump has already appointed three Supreme Court judges. In his second term, he may well have the chance to name two more, creating a high court with a Trump-appointed majority that could serve for decades.

A decisive result relieves the court of the need to delve into election disputes. It also appears likely to change the nature of the cases judges hear, including on abortion and immigration.

Two senior judges – Clarence Thomas76 and Samuel Alito74, could consider resigning, knowing that Trump, a Republican, would appoint a replacement who could be three decades younger and ensure conservative dominance on the court until mid-century or later.

Trump will have a long list of nominees to choose from among the more than 50 men and women he has appointed to federal appeals courts, including some of Thomas and Alito’s former law clerks.

If both men had resigned, they likely would not have done so immediately to minimize disruption to the court. Justices David Souter and John Paul Stevens retired within a year of each other during the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency.

Thomas has repeatedly stated that he has no plans to retire.

But Ed Whelan, a conservative jurist who once clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, wrote on National Review’s Bench Memos blog that Thomas will realize the best way to burnish his legacy is to replace him with a like-minded justice and retire. before the midterm congressional elections.

If Thomas remains on the court until his 80th birthday in June 2028, he will surpass William O. Douglas as the longest-serving justice. Douglas has been on the court for over 36 years.

There is no guarantee that Republicans will then have a majority in the Senate, and Thomas saw what happened when one of his colleagues did not resign when she could have done so, Whelan wrote. “But he would be foolish to risk repeating Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s mistake of hanging on only to die in office and be replaced by someone with a completely different legal philosophy,” Whelan wrote.

Ginsburg died in September 2020, less than two months before Joe Biden was elected president. Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to fill the vacancy, and majority Republicans pushed her nomination through the Senate before the election.

Barrett, along with Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, two other Trump appointees to the Supreme Court, joined Thomas and Alito to overturn Roe v. Wade and end the nation’s abortion rights.

Along with Chief Justice John Roberts, conservatives also expanded gun rights, ended affirmative action in college admissions, limited the Biden administration’s efforts to combat climate change and weakened federal regulators by overturning a 40-year-old decision that had long been the target of business and conservative interests.

The court’s landmark decision did not end its involvement in abortion: This year, justices also heard emergency abortion cases in states where medication abortions are illegal and available.

The new administration will likely reverse the Biden administration’s guidance that doctors must perform emergency abortions when necessary to protect a woman’s life or health, even in states where abortion is illegal. That would put an end to the Idaho case, which judges sent back to lower courts over the summer.

Access to the abortion drug mifepristone also faces challenges. new challenge in lower courts. This lawsuit could backfire in lower courts after The Supreme Court retained access earlier this year, but abortion opponents have suggested other ways a conservative administration could restrict access to the drug. This includes following a 19th century anti-vice law called Comstock’s Law which bans the distribution of drugs that can be used in abortions, although Trump himself has not expressed a clear position on mifepristone.

Immigration cases are also coming up in the courts during the Obama era. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program. Trump tried to end DACA in his first term, but was thwarted by the Supreme Court. Now a conservative appeals court in New Orleans is weighing in on the legality of DACA.

One of the first battles of the Trump era to reach the Supreme Court involved a ban on visitors from some Muslim-majority countries. The judges ultimately approved the program after two amendments.

During the election campaign, he talked about reinstating the travel ban.