John Roberts engineered a set of decisions that really disappointed conservatives and might force Trump to make the Court a bigger deal in his campaign. Photo: Matt Rourke/AP/Shutterstock Without question, one of the highest stakes in the 2020 election is the president’s ability to make judicial appointments. It’s also not an issue voters often think much about.
Trump’s highly transactional approach to his judicial appointments wound up being an important part of the process whereby he convinced cultural conservatives that his candidacy was a gamble worth taking. White Evangelical voters in particular were really fixated on the need to reverse abortion and LGBTQ rights, as McKay Coppins later noted in The Atlantic:
Gorsuch’s “betrayal” in Bostock was a particular shock to the cultural right, in part because so many of their leaders had hailed his ascent to the Court and in part because the decision was so flatly definitive. Speaking with Coaston, conservative religious writer Rod Dreher summed up the reaction thusly:
Roberts is famously concerned about the Court losing its credibility if it develops a reputation for being politicized. And that may be one reason he has gone out of his way to avoid rubber-stamping Trump’s grandiose ideas of presidential power in cases ranging from an ideologically driven census question to a clumsy effort to kill protections for DACA recipients to the two cases ending the term wherein the Court rejected presidential claims of immunity from subpoenas.
ed_kilgore Don’t give him ideas.
ed_kilgore There’s no way rational minds would want 4 more yrs of incompetence. No 1 is gonna Sacrifice their kids 4 the economy except low brow trump advocates & trump himself. In 4 1/2 yrs how many times have you seen them together? He could less about his kid. He’s a Sad excuse 4 a Dad!
ed_kilgore Lead sentence. Why such tortured verbiage? Write clearly for Christ's sake