As the first Republican president to get his judicial nominees confirmed by a simple majority vote, thanks to the abolition of the Senate filibuster rule, Mr. Trump has already broken records in appointing young and highly conservative appellate judges. Now, Mr. Trump can create a new majority bloc on the Supreme Court — one that is far more consistently conservative, and one that can impose its influence over American life long after his presidency ends on issues as diverse as the environment and labor or abortion and civil rights.
If Mr. Trump secures that prospect, he will fulfill the deal that he struck during the 2016 campaign with traditional and movement conservatives who were skeptical of his politics and hesitant about supporting his candidacy. They feared he would pick an idiosyncratic nominee, like a celebrity lawyer he saw on television, rather than an authentic conservative.
But Mr. Trump shored up Republican turnout in the election by promising to select Supreme Court nominations from a list of conservative judges. It was shaped by his top legal adviser, Donald F. McGahn II, now the White House counsel, who worked with advisers like Leonard Leo, the executive director of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal movement network.
.. joking shorthand for what traditional Republicans got in return: “But Gorsuch.” In November, the White House quietly issued a revised version of the list in case another vacancy arose.
.. “The danger is that the Supreme Court, at the behest of this president, will favor the wealthy and powerful and extremist groups at the expense of everyone else — not just for President Trump’s term, but for decades to come,” she said.
.. The prospects for the nominee’s confirmation will most likely come down to how a handful of moderate senators will vote. Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, both Republicans who support abortion rights, are considered key votes in a narrowly divided Senate, as are Senators Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, all Democrats up for re-election in states that Mr. Trump won.
.. the Trump administration’s recent indication that it will try to use the courts to dismantle the law’s popular protections for people with pre-existing conditions.
.. “People get that this is about undoing precedent and advancing the interests of corporations and the wealthy and privileged, not all of us as Americans.”
.. Adding to the court a pick from Mr. Trump’s list creates the “prospect of a conservative majority over a long period of time,” even if Mr. Trump loses to a Democrat in 2020 who could restock the court’s liberal minority
.. he was optimistic that the fight over the new vacancy would help Republicans maintain control of the Senate in the midterm elections by keeping the courts as a primary topic of political conversation in the coming months.
.. Mr. Trump to create an even more enduring achievement if a liberal justice’s seat opened, perhaps for health reasons, in the second half of his term
How The Social Order Crumbles
It has been observed many times that liberalism is mostly a secularized version of Christianity; there’s a lot of truth to that. As I read Why Liberalism Failed, I take Deneen as saying that liberalism had to fail because at its core it stands for liberating the individual from an unchosen obligation. Ultimately, it forms consumers, not citizens.
.. liberalism cannot generate within itself the virtues it needs to survive.
.. Free markets are a core part of the liberal democratic model, but given the globalized nature of the economy, and rapid technological changes, we have to face the possibility that liberalism as we have understood it is inadequate to provide for the good of workers left behind by these changes.
.. I keep going back to Adams’s line about our Constitution is only good for a “moral and religious people,” because self-government by the people can only work for people who possess the virtues to govern their own passions.
.. to perceive and to achieve the virtues embedded within liberalism, one has to be oriented towards a sense that there really are moral and religious truths beyond ourselves that bind our conduct.
.. Liberalism has degenerated into Justice Anthony Kennedy’s famous line:
At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.
The Obscure Lawyer Who Might Become the Most Powerful Woman in Washington
If the deputy attorney general resigns or gets fired, oversight of the Trump-Russia investigation would fall to the Justice Department’s No. 3, Rachel Brand.
Senate Democrats who opposed her nomination to the No. 3 job at the Justice Department said her legal career reflected a tendency always to support Big Business against the little guy, and they questioned her commitment to civil liberties during her years in the department under President George W. Bush.
.. She has a “heavily skewed pro-corporate agenda,” said Senator Patrick Leahy
.. Brand was confirmed to her job on a party-line Senate vote of 52 to 46.
.. Rosenstein .. has privately conferred with Brand about the possibility that she will need to take over the department’s oversight of Mueller
.. She was active in the Federalist Society, the conservative lawyer’s group that has long been a talent pool for anyone interested in serving in the administration of a Republican president or on the Supreme Court.
.. hired as a Supreme Court clerk to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy
.. In 2011, Brand became a top lawyer for the United States Chamber of Commerce
.. “If you hire a lawyer, they are going to represent your view. We can’t assume an attorney personally believes in what they are advocating on behalf of their clients. Just ask criminal defense lawyers.”
.. she might now be confronting the “tough task of insulating the investigation from the erratic and inappropriate behavior of President Trump.”
.. Rosenstein might welcome turning over the responsibilities to Brand because it would take him out of the immediate line of fire
Meet the Math Professor Who’s Fighting Gerrymandering With Geometry
Moon Duchin is an associate professor of math and director of the Science, Technology and Society program at Tufts. She realized last year that some of her research about metric geometry could be applied to gerrymandering — the practice of manipulating the shape of electoral districts to benefit a specific party, which is widely seen as a major contributor to government dysfunction.
.. In redistricting, one of the principles that’s taken seriously by courts is that districts should be compact. The U.S. Constitution does not say that, but many state constitutions do, and it’s taken as a kind of general principle of how districts ought to look.
.. So our first aim was to think like mathematicians about compactness and look at all the definitions that already exist, and compare them and try to prove theorems about the relationships between the definitions.
.. this landscape of compactness had a hole in it. It’s not that mathematicians hadn’t been working on it; it’s that [geometry experts] hadn’t entered the legal conversation.
.. the Polsby-Popper score; that’s the area of a district compared to the area of a circle of the same perimeter, given as a percentage.
.. It turns out that if you take a district and you look at the average distances between all of its points, then the bigger that is, the less compact, once you normalize by the diameter. That meant that I already had published theorems that, I think, cast some light on the districting problem.
.. The point of the summer school isn’t just to bring people together so we can convince them of our ideas. We also want to pool ideas and see, putting all those brilliant people in one place, can we make some progress on what’s been a pretty intractable problem?
.. Bouncing things off of diverse audiences has taught me things I didn’t already know about how rhetorically accessible different ideas are. This is well-known to educators: Once you achieve a certain level of expertise, it can be hard to find the difficult spots and the reasoning anymore because they’re so familiar to you.
.. the “efficiency gap.” It was a new metric of partisan gerrymandering that, for the first time, a court said they liked. The way it was devised was that the people who created it, they went back and they read all of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s written decisions about measuring gerrymandering. By reading his words and by reading what he said he found convincing and less convincing, they designed a statistic to appeal to him. He’s that vaunted median justice. If you can come up with something that will be convincing to Anthony Kennedy, then you’ve probably just changed the outcome.