Trump's Supreme Decision

The last couple weeks of talk shows have presented the edifying sight of conservatives and Republicans who look like they've just eaten an entire lemon.

This sour attitude is, of course, because of the presumptive nominee being Donald J. Trump, who yesterday paid the Clintons to attend his daughter's wedding, and the day before yesterday donated to Hillary's campaign, as well as committing many other unconservative infractions.

But that was yesterday.  Today, Donald Trump is breathing fire and throwing out chunks of red meat to adulatory crowds.  Nobody knows whether he means what he says, not even he himself.

There is, however, one issue above all that focuses conservative minds wonderfully: the Supreme Court, and specifically the empty seat so recently warmed by Justice Antonin Scalia.  Today, the court sits at more or less of a tie - and that's assuming Justice Kennedy sides with the conservatives, which he often does but not always.

As we've seen, the Left loves to use the court to ram leftist changes down the throat of America, even when the actual voters have resoundingly rejected their inroads.  The people of California overwhelmingly voted to amend their constitution to forbid gay marriage, but the constitutional amendment was found unconstitutional (!) by a homosexual judge who (surprise, surprise) promptly married his lover after declaring it legal by fiat.  More recently, the Supreme Court did the same thing to the country as a whole.

The Supreme Court cannot make America great again.  It can, however, somewhat slow the slide into the pit, buying us time, and it can reject some of the left's worst excesses.

So the thoughts of Donald Trump on who would make a good Justice are of the utmost importance.  If Mr. Trump wishes to appoint judges like his pro-abortion sister, we might as well just let Hillary be at the helm when the ship goes down.

But it's just possible that Mr. Trump is wiser, and cagier, than some give him credit for.  His campaign released a short list of potential nominees, and - well, let's see what the Left had to say about them:

The list shows—maybe even more effectively than the dissents in Hobby Lobby—why women’s reproductive freedom is in real peril, because it shows Trump’s eagerness to seat justices who will do away with the right to choose.

It's hard to know whether media leftists are simply taking the opportunity to bash a Republican with anything to hand regardless of the truth, or if they're genuinely worried, but this sort of fiery response from them can't be anything but a good sign.

Indeed, the fiercely Never-Trumpian National Review seemed to find a strange new respect for him on perusing his list:

First, his list of potential nominees did not all receive their law degrees in Cambridge, Mass., or New Haven, Conn.

Second, Trump did not limit his search to the usual inside-the-beltway favorites.

Third, for the first time in a generation, not a single judge from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals — often called the second-highest court in the land — made the Supreme Court shortlist.

Fourth, this geographic diversity also instills a respect for the principles of federalism: Not all of the answers to our problems will come from the seat of the central government, many will come from the “laboratories of Democracy” in the several states.

What are they getting at?  Really, they are making one simple but essential point: there is more to the United States than Harvard and Yale!  In fact, the New Yorker to the contrary, there is more to America than New York City no matter how worthwhile New York values may or may not be.  Nothing against the Big Apple, but why is it appropriate for four of the justices - half, in fact - to hail from that one single metropolis?

William F. Buckley once famously said he'd rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University.  In effect, though, we've accomplished most of that, with all our current justices being the products of the Harvard faculty with some assistance from their compatriots at Yale.  And we see the dire consequences.

Which is why it's so encouraging that Trump's list features mostly people who studied elsewhere.  Even more, he didn't just look at other famous non-Harvard law schools like Duke and Georgetown, but considered candidates who hail from the University of Kansas.

Consider the difference in perspective that these denizens of flyover country would bring to the court!  A midwestern prairie judge would be even more of an outsider than The Donald himself, which is just what the Court needs.

Aside from their personal views which would naturally be more conservative, though, picking candidates from all across the fruited plain underscores the forgotten principle of Federalism.  The United States is not supposed to be a unitary government ruled from one single imperial city as was England and the entire British Empire at the time of the Revolution.

In America, power is supposed to be widely distributed: to states, to cities, to towns, to counties, and wherever possible, to the people themselves.  Our Founders fully expected the different states to have quite different styles and laws, only requiring them to honor the principle of representative government.  The Constitution is a list of a very few powers the federal government has and states that it does not have any other powers - those powers "are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."

Originally the Bill of Rights didn't even apply to the states at all - Massachusetts enforced Puritan Congregationalism by force of law from the days of the Pilgrims right up through 1834, and Connecticut did the same for nearly as long.  We wouldn't care to return to formally established state churches even at the state level, but today we are suffering under a nationally imposed religion of aggressively secular humanism unyieldingly opposed to any vestiges of religious-based morality or sanity.

Having a Supreme Court composed of justices who understand very different parts of our vast country will lead to decisions which allow more latitude for the states to go their separate ways.

In our opinion, only this can prevent the eventual Second Civil War and dissolution of the United States that we see on the horizon.  Who knows: Donald Trump might actually become another President who Saved the Union!

Okay, probably not.  But in this election, even the wildly unlikely has a habit of becoming reality.