WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump has already appointed three Supreme Court justices. In his second term, he could well get the chance to name two more, creating a Supreme Court with a Trump-appointed majority that could serve for decades.
The decisive outcome spares the court an election dispute. It also seems likely that this will change the tenor of the cases that come before the courts, including in the areas of abortion and immigration.
The two oldest justices — Clarence Thomas, 76, and Samuel Alito, 74 — could consider resigning knowing that Trump, a Republican, would appoint replacements who could be as much as 30 years younger and who would challenge conservative dominance of the court until the middle of the century. or further.
Trump would have a long list of candidates to choose from among the more than 50 men and women he has appointed to federal appeals courts, including several former clerks for Thomas and Alito.
If both men were to retire, they would likely not do so at once to minimize disruption to the court. Justices David Souter and John Paul Stevens retired a year apart during the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency.
Thomas has said more than once that he has no plans to retire.
But Ed Whelan, a conservative lawyer who once clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, wrote on the National Review’s Bench Memos blog that Thomas will realize that the best way to burnish his legacy is to have a like-minded justice replace him and retire. before the midterm congressional elections.
If Thomas remains on the court until nearly his 80th birthday, in June 2028, he will surpass William O. Douglas as the longest-serving judge. Douglas was on the field for more than 36 years.
There is no guarantee that Republicans will then have their majority in the Senate, and Thomas saw what happened when one of his colleagues did not retire when she could have, Whelan wrote. “But it would be foolish of him to risk repeating Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s mistake: insisting on dying in office and being replaced by someone with a very different legal philosophy,” Whelan wrote.
Ginsburg died in September 2020, less than two months before Joe Biden’s election as president. Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to fill the vacancy and the majority of Republicans rammed her nomination through the Senate before the election.
Barrett, along with Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s other two appointees to the Supreme Court, joined Thomas and Alito to overturn Roe v. Wade and end the nation’s right to abortion.
Along with Chief Justice John Roberts, conservatives have also expanded gun rights, ended affirmative action in college admissions, reined in the Biden administration’s efforts to address climate change and weakened federal regulators over a four-decade decision to be reversed. target of business and conservative interests.
The court’s landmark decision did not end the involvement in abortion: the justices this year also heard cases on emergency abortions in states with bans on and access to medication abortion.
It seems likely that the new administration will drop the Biden administration’s guidelines that require doctors to perform emergency abortions if necessary to protect a woman’s life or health, even in states where abortion is otherwise banned. That would end an Idaho case that justices sent back to lower courts this summer.
Access to the abortion drug mifepristone is also facing a renewed challenge in lower courts. That lawsuit could face an uphill climb in the lower courts after the Supreme Court upheld access to the drug earlier this year, but abortion opponents have suggested other ways a conservative government could restrict access to the drug. That includes enforcing a 19th-century “anti-vice” law called the Comstock Act, which bans the shipment of drugs that could be used in abortion, although Trump himself has not taken a clear position on mifepristone.
Immigration cases are also moving through the courts because of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Trump tried to end DACA during his first term, but was thwarted by the Supreme Court. Now the conservative appeals court in New Orleans is considering whether DACA is legal.
One of the first Trump-era battles to reach the Supreme Court involved bans on visitors from some Muslim-majority countries. The judges ultimately approved the program after two reviews.
He spoke during the campaign about bringing back the travel ban.
