Supreme Court move both a vote winner and election insurance
President Donald Trump is infusing deliberations over his coming nomination of a new Supreme Court justice tomorrow with political meaning as he aims to maximise the benefit before November 3 and secure an electoral backstop should the result be contested.
Even before Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death last week, the president had tried to use likelihood of more Supreme Court vacancies to his political advantage. Now, as he closes in on a decision on her likely replacement, Trump has used the vacancy to appeal to battleground-state voters and as a rallying cry for his conservative base.
He also is increasingly embracing the high court — which he will have had an outsized hand in reshaping — as an insurance policy in a close election.
Increases in mail, absentee and early voting brought about by the pandemic have already brought about a flurry of election litigation, and both Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden have assembled armies of lawyers to continue the fight once votecounting begins. Trump has been open about tying his push to name a third justice to the court to a potentially drawn-out court fight to determine who will be sworn in on January 20, 2021.
“I think this will end up in the Supreme Court,” Trump said on Thursday of the election, adding, “And I think it’s very important that we have nine justices.”
It’s a line echoed by Trump allies, including Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who said yesterday, “I think that threat to challenge the election is one of the real reasons why it is so important that we confirm the Supreme Court nominees, so that there’s a full Supreme Court on the bench to resolve any election challenge.”
Barely six weeks from Election Day, and as millions of Americans are already voting, Trump and his advisers have tried to use the court vacancy to help deliver
Trump another term in office.
Within hours of Ginsburg’s death, Trump made clear his intention to nominate a woman in her stead, after previously putting two men on the court and as he struggles to mitigate an erosion in support among suburban women.
In discussing his five-person short list, he’s been sure to highlight some from election battlegrounds that he’s aiming to win this fall as much as their jurisprudence.
“I’ve heard incredible things about her,” he said of Florida’s Barbara Lagoa, a day after Ginsburg’s death. “I don’t know her. She’s Hispanic and highly respected. Miami. Highly respected.”
In an interview with a Detroit television station, he volunteered that hometown Justice Joan Larsen is “very talented.”
Trump and his aides, though, appear to have set their sights on nominating Judge Amy Coney Barrett of Indiana, who was at the White House twice this week, including for a Tuesday meeting with Trump.
Trump played up the power to make judicial nominations with conservative voters in 2016, when Republicans senators kept open the seat vacated by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia rather than let President Barack Obama fill the opening. Trump’s decision to release lists of accomplished conservative jurists for potential elevation to the high court was rewarded by increased enthusiasm among white evangelical voters. Even before Ginsburg’s death, Trump had done the same in 2020, releasing an additional 20 names he would consider for the court, and encouraging Democrat Joe Biden to do the same.
Biden has resisted that pressure so far, but that hasn’t stopped Trump from trying to sow fear among conservatives about whom the Democrat might nominate.
“If Joe Biden and the Democrats take power, they will pack the Supreme Court with farleft radicals who will unilaterally transform American society far beyond recognition,” Trump said at a rally outside Toledo on Tuesday. “They will mutilate the law, disfigure the Constitution and impose a socialist vision from the bench that could never pass at the ballot box.”