By: FRANCESCA CIUFFO
With Justice Scalia’s seat vacant, it will certainly be filled by a conservative nominee next year. The court will now be tilted right, as it has been for decades.
The choice of the U.S. Supreme Court justice will soon belong to President-elect Trump, which supports Republican senators’ refusal to allow President Obama to choose Garland to Scalia’s seat.
Some liberals hope that even if the court is dominantly conservative, it could still hinder Trumps’s ambitions.
“Given that many of the conservatives on his list are more in the traditional conservative mold than Trump himself, they might not simply write him a blank check when it comes to actions and policies that threaten constitutional structure,” said Elizabeth Wydra, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center.
The news media would cover a story like this because Trump’s presidency is not a good thing for liberals. Many are worried about what comes next at the Supreme Court. They almost had a liberal-leaning Supreme Court for the first time in decades and now they have to deal with yet another right-leaning court and liberals feeling overshadowed and nearly disappearing in the Supreme Court. This election is one of the most important and controversial elections there has ever been, so it is important for the news media to cover it and for the public to stay on top of what happens next.
In March, public-sector unions were threatened, but this could soon reach the court again, and this time, the challengers are likely to gain a fifth vote.
Trump is likely to undo what Obama’s approaches were to climate change, transgender rights, and abortion issues. A Supreme Court controlled by conservatives is likely to further secure gun rights and resume the deregulation of campaign finance.
The candidates on Trump’s list of possible nominees are almost all working judges and several served as law assistants to conservative Supreme Court justices. Many have judicial track records hostile to federal power, abortion rights and gay marriage, so it will be interesting to see how it plays out.