Frankly, he’s doing better than any other modern era Republican. Didn’t hurt that Dirty Harry (Reid) paved the way for the destruction of the Liberals hold on the judiciary. Emphasis mine – and note that at the bottom of this quote:
The media remains so caught up with the president’s tweets that it has missed Mr. Trump’s project to transform the rest of the federal judiciary. The president is stocking the courts with a class of brilliant young textualists bearing little relation to even their Reagan or Bush predecessors. Mr. Trump’s nastygrams to Bob Corker will be a distant memory next week. Notre Dame law professor Amy Coney Barrett’s influence on the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals could still be going strong 40 years from now.
Mr. Trump has now nominated nearly 60 judges, filling more vacancies than Barack Obama did in his entire first year. There are another 160 court openings, allowing Mr. Trump to flip or further consolidate conservative majorities on the circuit courts that have the final say on 99% of federal legal disputes.
And given the presumption of the modern judiciary to be a “super-legislature” unaccountable to voters, this is a big deal. The Democrats have depended on the Judiciary any time that they can’t get their way through the Legislative branch – Roe vs. Wade, Gay Marriage for two examples. Issues that should be run though the legislative process instead of just being imposed by fiat via “penumbras” in the Constitution (just like Progressives seeing “unconscious racism” in every white person they see). It continues:
This project is the work of Mr. Trump, White House Counsel Don McGahn and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Every new president cares about the judiciary, but no administration in memory has approached appointments with more purpose than this team.
Mr. Trump makes the decisions, though he’s taking cues from Mr. McGahn and his team. The Bushies preferred a committee approach: Dozens of advisers hunted for the least controversial nominee with the smallest paper trail. That helped get picks past a Senate filibuster, but it led to bland choices, or to ideological surprises like retired Justice David Souter.
Harry Reid’s 2013 decision to blow up the filibuster for judicial nominees has freed the Trump White House from having to worry about a Democratic veto during confirmation. Mr. McGahn’s team (loaded with former Clarence Thomas clerks) has carte blanche to work with outside groups like the Federalist Society to tap the most conservative judges.
Mr. McGahn has long been obsessed with constitutional law and the risks of an all-powerful administrative state. His crew isn’t subjecting candidates to 1980s-style litmus tests on issues like abortion. Instead the focus is on promoting jurists who understand the unique challenges of our big-government times. Can the prospective nominee read a statute? Does he or she defer to the government’s view of its own authority? The result has been a band of young rock stars and Scalia-style textualists like Ms. Barrett, Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett and Minnesota Supreme Court Associate Justice David Stras.
Boo-yah! The rise of the Administrative State, powered by Progressive Totalitarians who virtually make up said State, is an existential threat to self-government because those Progressive bureaucrats like said power. Frankly, they take a dim view of voters, of taxpayers, and seemingly exist to wield their power and extend their mission by redefining the original legislation’s purpose (think EPA). Whenever the former is challenged by the latter, the Progressive special interest groups run to a like-minded judge.
With killing off said bureaucrats’ rules and regulations (having the power of Law), Trump is boxing Progressives into a canyon in which their gripes and whining can go nowhere.
Good times, good times. And given all of wailing that Trump is killing the Constitution via his tweets (“fake news…lose their licenses”), he’s actually EMPOWERING the Constitutional processes. I will admit, I need to do a bit more on the E.O. of the associations being able to buy healthcare insurance across state lines and outside Obamacare regs, but it IS returning us to more of a free market situation. That said, notice that he’s starting to toss more and more of the issues that Obama screwed up with E.O.s back to Congress – the Iran decertification (“in your court guys!”) and DACA (“in your court, guys!”).
If he is the fascist the Left (and some Republicans) believe he is, why is he doing these things instead of doing what Obama did – pulling all of that power into himself? Instead, he’s devolving said Presidential Power. You may not like his off-the-cuff utterances, his tweets (some of which I think are a little absurd – sometimes a lot), but as I say all the time, look at the ACTIONS and ignore the words. After all, look at Jeb Bradley and what he SAID about Medicaid Expansion – completely different than what he DID.
