Dems face years in the wilderness

The confirmation of Donald Trump’s second Supreme Court justice triggers a tectonic shift in its balance that will be felt for decades.

The court has teetered on the fulcrum of Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy since 2006. As the swing vote, Kennedy sided with his four liberal colleagues on many social issues and with the four conservatives on most others.

The addition of Brett Kavanaugh tips the scales sharply rightward, say political scientists who analyze the justices’ ideological leanings based on past rulings.

On the conservative side, Kavanaugh’s tendency to interpret the Constitution strictly, in line with the Founders’ original intent, places him between Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas on its new ideological spectrum, according to one scholarly study, with Thomas at the far right, and the newest justice, Neil Gorsuch, slightly more toward the center.

That leaves Chief Justice John Roberts, the most moderate, as the new man in the middle — but still very much a conservative at heart.

Roberts’ past rulings reveal his major interests: ending affirmative action and other race-based preferences, deregulating political spending and protecting gun rights.

Court watchers expect to see those issues taken up in future terms — as well as cases that activist litigators have been seeding through the federal court system ever since Trump took the White House. Those future cases could strike down regulations on the minimum wage and rein in federal environmental policies. Abortion cases on the horizon could restrict public funding for abortion providers or allow states to more tightly regulate the procedure — without actually overturning Roe v. Wade.

Meanwhile, the court’s four left-leaning members, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, are facing the prospect of years in the minority — and authoring a long string of dissenting opinions.

Ginsburg, who will turn 86 during this term, and Breyer, 80, are now the court’s oldest justices. If either of them exits during the next two years of Trump’s presidency, he could name any of the 24 remaining candidates on his list of potential nominees — all but one of whom are thought to be well to the right of Roberts.