Justice Gorsuch fires a torpedo at Trump's re-election
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch fired a torpedo at President Trump's re-election campaign on Monday morning. That almost certainly wasn't his intent, but it will be the political effect of the majority decision he authored in Bostock v. Clayton County and Altitude Express Inc. v. Zarda.
Progressives will cheer the high court's 6-3 decision, ruling that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects gay and transgender Americans from discrimination in employment. But the fact that the majority decision was authored by Gorsuch and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, leaving just three of the court's five conservatives in lonely dissent, will have explosive implications on the right.
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Only after Trump had locked down the nomination and pledged to appoint judges to the federal courts who had been verified as reliably conservative by the right-leaning legal organization The Federalist Society did these crucially important groups come around to supporting the ideologically and temperamentally unorthodox (and morally repellant) nominee.
These voters stuck with Trump through the election and have become some of his most loyal supporters ever since for one reason above all others: because Trump vowed to deliver the federal courts to social conservatives. Trump made good on this promise right out of the gate by nominating conservative Gorsuch to the seat on the Supreme Court formerly held by Antonin Scalia, who died in February 2016 and whose seat Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had held open through the remainder of Barack Obama's final year in office.
When Trump critics accused social conservatives of having sold their souls to a president unworthy of their adoration, the stock response was now "But Gorsuch!" Translation: Trump might have flaws, but he promised to deliver us the judiciary, and on that he's made good! No matter what happened over the coming decades in the political arena, conservatives had captured the courts, and that would ensure victories on the issues that really matter to the religious right: protecting the unborn and religious freedom, and limiting gay and transgender rights.
With his 29-page majority opinion in Bostock, Gorsuch blew that electoral rationale out of the water. Scholars can debate the legal ins and outs of the decision. In political terms, the result is going to be an earthquake to rival the one that reverberated throughout the right in the wake of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision in which Republican appointees Kennedy, David Souter, and Sandra Day O'Connor joined with the court's liberals to uphold the reproductive rights of women.
https://theweek.com/articles/920057/justice-gorsuch-fires-torpedo-trumps-reelection
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They are freed from the constraints of worrying about whether or not their behavior will affect their long-term job.
It won't, probably.
They are then free to decide based on what they really think, and this can lead to decisions like this one.
I'm totally celebrating this decision which has been a long time coming.
I worked a lot for gay marriage, but I always felt that job discrimination was
the larger issue.
Can't really express the joy I feel about what happened today.
I hope the pResident and his cronies have a big lump in their throats over this.
Congratulations to all my fellow LGBT Americans who fought hard for the win.
But I've got 3 branch saws & I know exactly where they are.
We each get one, and we start on each side and saw toward each other!
v
Balding_Eagle: Now that you’ve given up, are you going to change your screen name?
Trumpisourlastchance:May have to, we shall see.
I think it means they rotate votes. Kavanaugh sat this one out and will take one for Team Uniparty later. We’re being played like a fiddle here.
Such delicious, salty tears.
coming up in a month or so...
