Today’s Supreme Court decision blocking President Trump from ending the Obama-era immigration program DACA, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining the four liberal justices on the bench in declaring that Trump’s attempt to undo a previous president’s executive order with one of his own was “arbitrary and capricious,” provides more evidence that Roberts is no longer considered a reliable vote in favor of protecting the Second Amendment rights of gun owners by his own colleagues on the bench, which is why ten cases dealing with the right to keep and bear arms were all recently rejected by the Court, even though there are clearly enough votes on the bench to consider one or more challenges to gun control laws.
Trump weighed in on the DACA decision on Twitter shortly after it was handed down, and directly tied in the opinion by Roberts to the future of the Second Amendment at the Court.
These horrible & politically charged decisions coming out of the Supreme Court are shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives. We need more Justices or we will lose our 2nd. Amendment & everything else. Vote Trump 2020!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2020
Conservatives’ dreams of a Supreme Court with a strong conservative majority bear a strong resemblance to Charlie Brown’s dream of kicking a football held by Lucy. We keep trying, though the football always seems to get yanked away. With Roberts, conservatives have been repeatedly upturned by the chief justice’s votes to uphold Obamacare and DACA, to moot the challenge to a New York City gun law, and more.
Four years ago, judicial appointments were one of the big reasons many voters may have voted for Trump despite their personal reservations, and the president, along with Republicans in the Senate, has delivered in a big way, with nearly two hundred appointments to the bench, from the Supreme Court down to U.S. District courtrooms. Now Trump is once again reminding voters of the importance of the judiciary in this year’s elections, not only by directly acknowledging the threat to our Second Amendment rights that a hostile Supreme Court would pose, but by also declaring that he will once again release a list of candidates to the Supreme Court before the end of summer.
…Based on decisions being rendered now, this list is more important than ever before (Second Amendment, Right to Life, Religous Liberty, etc.) – VOTE 2020!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2020
Will Joe Biden do the same? So far, he’s not committed to doing so, though he’s faced calls from both the left and the right to follow Trump’s lead and release his Supreme Court shortlist. As The Hill reported just a few days ago:
“We think he should take the next step and say who those people are, so we have a more concrete sense of who he would nominate, sort of what the values are that he hopes those people might bring to the Supreme Court,” Christopher Kang, the chief counsel for Demand Justice, told The Hill in a recent interview.
Kang added it would be “reassuring” to get more details on whom Biden is considering.
“I think it could be an opportunity for him to really help consolidate the Democratic base by showing that the people he’s thinking about are people who have not only led exemplary legal careers but are inspiring for the work that they’ve done,” he said.
It’s not just progressives who want to see who Biden could be looking at for the Supreme Court.
Carrie Severino, the president of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network, wrote in an op-ed that Biden would rather “prefer to play hide the ball” than say who he will nominate.
“Independents and the right would be just as interested to know who Biden has in mind. If he becomes President Biden, they fear the Supreme Court may be radicalized, perhaps to deliver an America of the kind that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the far left dream of,” she added, referring to the progressive New York House member.
I suspect Biden will do everything he can to avoid coming out with a list of candidates of his own, because the bigger this issue becomes, the more it benefits President Trump. There are voters out there who might not be thrilled about the idea of four more years of Trump in the White House, but they absolutely dread the idea of 40 years of far-left rulings by a Supreme Court packed with judges by Joe Biden. While Biden himself has not endorsed the idea of court-packing, plenty of other Democrats have, including Elizabeth Warren, who’s lobbying hard to be named Biden’s vice-presidential nominee. It’s smart for Trump to make SCOTUS a campaign issue, especially when it comes to our Second Amendment rights long neglected by the Court.
