As many of you know, significant elements of the conservative movement are rallying behind Donald Trump for one reason and one reason alone. They are frightened to death at the prospect of a President Hillary Clinton appointing at least one, and as many as six, justices to the Supreme Court. For instance, the religious right has largely condoned Trump’s outrages–and even joined in on at least one of them–because he’s made clucking noises about overturning Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hughes that they like.
But a number of conservative legal scholars have taken a seemingly contrarian view. They told Huffington Post that the importance of restoring a conservative majority on the Court is trumped (the pun was intended) by the numerous red flags surrounding a potential Trump presidency.
Among them is Richard Epstein, a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a law professor at NYU and the University of Chicago. According to Legal Affairs, he is one of the 20 most influential legal scholars of modern times. Epstein, a self-identified libertarian, initially thought that the list of 11 potential Supreme Court nominees was “the only glimmer of hope” that Trump wouldn’t be a complete disaster.
But once he had time to clear his head, Epstein concluded that those potential nominees wouldn’t even begin to make up for Trump’s “mercurial temperament and intellectual ignorance.” Specifically, Epstein said, Trump was “wholly unfit” to deal with foreign affairs and domestic policy. He believes that most “serious defenders of any serious version of the conservative or classical liberal traditions” don’t buy the argument that conservatives must vote for Trump if only because of the prospect of restoring the conservative majority on the Supreme Court.
Epstein’s views were echoed by David Post, a retired law professor at Temple and a frequent contributor to Eugene Volokh’s right-leaning legal blog, the Volokh Conspiracy. Post cautions his fellow conservatives that any concerns about the Court’s makeup shouldn’t even begin to overcome concerns about Trump’s “terrible baggage.” He suspects that the next president could only fill one Supreme Court seat. To his mind, it is “thoroughly preposterous” to suggest that one seat is important enough to overcome concerns about Trump’s behavior on the trail.
Fellow Volokh Conspiracy contributor Ilya Somin was even more blunt. Somin, a professor at George Mason University, thinks Trump’s promise to appoint conservative justices doesn’t begin to make up for his “terrible record on constitutional issues.” Among other things, Trump has made it clear that he wants to use the libel laws to effectively gag the press. Somin is also concerned about Trump’s views on property rights, as well as his extremely expansive view of presidential power.
Indeed, Somin fears that under the Donald, the GOP could potentially become “a big-government xenophobic party” along the lines of far-right parties in Western Europe–a party that will have little regard for civil liberties. For those reasons, Somin believes that as long as the GOP remains under Trump’s influence, it could “do far more to undermine the Constitution” than Hillary ever would.
These musings from people who are in a position to know should come as a cold douche to anyone who thinks they have to vote for Trump to keep Hillary from putting another God-hating librul or two on the Supreme Court. While they took a different route to do so, they’ve come to the same conclusion that we liberals drew a long time ago. That is, we simply cannot afford to put this country in the hands of a guy who is, by any definition, morally unfit to be president of the United States.
