President Trump has retained support from many Republicans and conservatives thanks to a Faustian bargain: So long as Trump stacks the judiciary with friendly judges, they’ve been willing to look the other way when Trump pushes trade protectionism, ditches entitlement reform, or woos Russia’s President Vladimir Putin — positions out of step with recent conservative orthodoxy. As David Harsanyi argued for the Federalist, “The question was,” for conservatives, “ ‘What’s scarier, a Trump presidency or a progressive Supreme Court?’ ”
Former George W. Bush administration attorney John Yoo said that he had deeply conservative friends “who would normally be utterly turned off by a guy like Trump,” yet supported him “only because of [the] appointment to Justice [Antonin] Scalia’s vacancy” on the Supreme Court. Conservative fixation with judges doesn’t only include the Supreme Court, but the lower courts as well. Noting that the Supreme Court hears a tiny fraction of the cases decided by appellate judges, Washington Post columnist Hugh Hewitt challengedTrump’s conservative critics to “reconcile their vehement opposition to him with their love of the Constitution. The latter is most definitely benefiting from the president’s massive impact on the federal bench, one that extends far beyond Justice Neil M. Gorsuch on the Supreme Court.
Conservatives may have felt the bargain paid off last week, when Trump clinched his 200th judicial confirmation faster than any president since Jimmy Carter. Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) tried to spike the ball when he said the milestone marked “a sea change, a generational change on the federal bench,” and that “Republicans are stemming this liberal judicial tide that we’ve lived with in the past.” Continue reading.