Posted on 06/27/2020 5:24:23 PM PDT by BillyBoy
Josh Hawley warns Trump on Supreme Court disappointments By MARIANNE LEVINE President Donald Trump counts reshaping the judiciary as one of his greatest accomplishments. But some top conservatives say his vaunted process for picking Supreme Court nominees needs to be revamped. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said in an interview that the high court’s latest string of left-leaning rulings suggests Trump should reconsider his vow to release a new list of potential Supreme Court nominees by September in his bid to win over socially conservative voters. “I don’t love the idea of just doing over what we have been doing in the past,” Hawley said. “The idea of issuing a new list, if it’s just going to be the same stuff and the same process, I mean I’m not wild about it. … When it comes to this whole process, we have to ask ourselves, is this vetting process, is this really working?” Trump has made the confirmation of 200 federal judges, including two Supreme Court justices, a significant part of his reelection campaign. But Hawley said religious conservatives right now are “very depressed,” particularly after Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump pick, wrote the decision providing LGBTQ workers with federal workplace protections. The disappointment comes as Trump can’t afford to lose a key part of his base amid fast-sinking polls. And the Supreme Court could deal another blow to conservatives soon in a case centering on a Louisiana anti-abortion law. Hawley said grassroots religious conservatives need to be much more involved in the Supreme Court discussions going forward given their political clout, and he offered a reminder to his friends in “the legal conservative project.” “Who actually goes out and votes for judges?” said Hawley. “It’s conservative Catholics, conservative Jews, evangelicals, Mormons. That coalition of folks is vitally important to the Republican Party. I think they feel just shocked at what's going on with the Supreme Court, so I think it’s vital that they be heard from and involved in this process.” Trump first released a list of possible Supreme Court nominees in May 2016 with input from conservatives affiliated with The Federalist Society and The Heritage Foundation. The names helped ease concerns about the GOP nominee, and many credit the move with encouraging evangelicals to come to the polls. Hawley, himself a former Supreme Court clerk, has been vocal lately in his criticism of the high court. But unlike other Republicans who share his frustrations and supported Gorsuch, Hawley is the first to take issue with the process employed so far to pick Trump appointments. Hawley’s effort to seize on the issue also offers a window into a possible 2024 presidential campaign that relies on a populist, socially conservative message. Top officials in conservative legal groups counter that religious organizations have always been involved and say that while they disagree with some of the Supreme Court’s decisions, conservatives are seeing a net positive under Trump. They also say Trump should be praised for his transparency in releasing a list, arguing it helped win his 2016 campaign. “There is the more secretive and narrow process of judicial selection that brought us David Souter and John Roberts,” said Leonard Leo, who was involved in the Supreme Court confirmation of Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Gorsuch. “And there is the process that President Trump established and created which is to create as much transparency as possible by publishing a list for all conservatives to see and respond to.” Leo, a co-chairman of The Federalist Society, also pushed back on the idea that religious conservatives have been ignored. “I seriously doubt that any thoughtful religious conservative would trade the Supreme Court of today, in spite of some significant disappointing decisions, for the Supreme Court of 25, 30 or 40 years ago,” he said. “As compared with conservative performance in the broader battle over our culture, the conservative legal movement has posted significantly more gains. Obviously, more can be achieved and that’s precisely what the president is trying to accomplish as he enters into the election cycle this November.” The president hasn’t been shy about touting his record on judicial nominees. In a recent interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, Trump said it was his top presidential achievement and predicted that close to 300 judges would be confirmed under his administration. But there are some signs of discontent. During his rally in Tulsa, Okla., when Trump touted Gorsuch’s confirmation, the crowd responded with boos. Carrie Severino, president of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network, praised Trump’s decision to publicly release a list, calling it a “bold” move. She also defended the vetting process for nominees and predicted Trump’s next list of Supreme Court nominees would also include a new pool of judges: appellate court nominees confirmed under his presidency. “That is a really different type of group than you had when Trump was choosing what to do. He was looking at largely Bush appointees,” Severino said. “Now he would have the opportunity to choose among Trump nominees ... [who] were chosen with specific interest in having a certain level of courage and principle in a way that the Bush administration wasn’t focusing on.” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who competed against Trump in 2016 and might seek the White House again one day, praised the president’s "leadership" on judicial nominees. “The last two weeks of decisions from the Court go to show just how important it is for President Trump to continue emphasizing the need to nominate strong justices to the bench who will defend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and I look forward to seeing the revised list,” Cruz added. Others on the right, however, say the Supreme Court has accumulated too much power altogether, and that Congress and the administration need to do more to counter disappointing legal decisions through legislation and executive authority. “The future of the movement is going to have to be much more willing to address our political problems through the political process,” said Terry Schilling, executive director of American Principles Project. “Congress needs to be much more engaged. The president needs to be much more engaged.” Gabby Orr contributed to this report.
The GOP senator says the president needs to overhaul his process for picking nominees, in a swipe at top legal conservatives.
I understand that Heritage Society has been getting money from Google. Do we trust their recommendations? The real problem is like a person contemplating what he would do if he won 10 million dollars in the lottery. He has all sorts of good deeds and thrifty uses of that money but he then wins it and everything inside him changes because now he can have all that stuff he used to dream about.
NO way, he thinks Anwar al-Awlaki’s kids, born in Yemen to one citizen parent, are natural born citizens eligible to be President.
(if he is, they are)
I hope he is but that wretched court just failed to hear any 2A cases. I don’t know what role if any he played in that.
Social conservatives have always been the red-headed stepchildren of the Establishment wing of the Republican Party. We are hated by the Establishment more than they hate Democrats.
Conservative lives matter!
How many conservative Protestants are currently serving on the Supreme Court? (waiting..., waiting...)
Apart from Clarence Thomas, how many Supreme Court Justices are from the South, the Midwest, or the Great Plains? (waiting..., waiting)
Bigotry and prejudice writ large. Very large.
Does it ever!!!!!
I think Thomas and Alito do not trust Roberts and do not want him undoing the Heller and MacDonald decisions, so they’re avoiding those cases until there is at least another Trump pick, maybe two.
Well... Gorsuch was touted as a "conservative Protestant" on here and the vast majority of FReepers immediately accepted that premise.
Those of us who warned that "conservative" Gorsuch attended some kooky liberal "social justice" activist protestant church were ignored and flatly dismissed.
Gorsuch is an Episcopalian with perverted ministers. He would have switched to the Anglican church if he had been conservative.
That’s what I knew.
What we are seeing is not any more complicated than the left being bullies, and the justices being chicken. I don’t think it has anything to do with their legal philosophies. And you can’t tell who has the fortitude to stand up to this BS until they are on the court.
Only more violent and fanatical.
Do you think that future SC candidates aren't going to be thinking about what they did to Kavanaugh?
If the DemoOrcs NEVER pay a price for their lies and character assassinations, they'll continue on their merry way.
This gay obsessed parish:
https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/neil-gorsuch-attends-liberal-lgbt-friendly-episcopalian-parish
Politics is the art of the possible.
The POTUS is stuck with appointing human beings; there have been few who haven’t been corrupted by the power, and they will always be a minority. The best that starting with a ‘conservative’ does is to slow down the process.
President Trump has been under constant siege from the beginning so Trump supporters tend to reflexively support whatever he does, whoever he endorses.
Personally, I believe we need to ignore his endorsements and primary out the Bush League Republicans or we will never be able to do the swamp draining that only we can do.
Re-electing the same Bush League Republicans who have been secretly and openly undermining his (and our) agenda is counter-productive.
He has endorsed McCain, Romney, Graham and others who are the very people pushing the policy of turning the USA into North Mexico that we elected Trump to reverse.
“There are quite a few new Trump Appeals Court and district judges confirmed in 52 - 48 votes. Within that group are a number of VERY good and VERY young potential Supreme Court nominees.”
Good point. The Dims probably vet the Republican nominees better than the Republicans do. And when every Dim votes against one of the nominees, you have to conclude that candidate is likely to be a very good choice.
I hope you are right. After the democrats murdered Scalia those are the only ones I trust right now.
Those are really the only two conservatives on the court.
Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are the moderates.
Roberts is the swinger.
And then we have the four leftists.
“Establish a review committee comprised of Tucker Carlson, Pat Buchanan, and Rand Paul,...”
...and me!
The weird thing is that his Attorney General pick was clearly FAR more socially conservative than either of his SCOTUS nominees (Barr is on record saying publicly on numerous occasions that Roe v. Wade was a terrible decision and should be overturned, that Christians are under attack in a culture war, etc., etc.), but some of Trump's biggest fans on here were vehemently AGAINST his Attorney General pick and kept sneering he was a "swamp creature"
I said it at the time and its even more obvious now, I would take his "bad" Attorney General nominee over his "originalist" SCOTUS nominees any day.
In one decision, Gorsuch has proven himself to be a lifelong homosexualist spy who made it to the top by ingratiating himself for years with Leonard Leo and his network.
I realize there is “no religious test” but no practicing Episcopalian who attends a conformist ECUSA church should be on any conservative’s shortlist. And Gorsuch should further have been dumped when he tried to distance himself from Trump during the nomination process. Since his election, I have yet to meet a true conservative who hates or fears Trump.
Leonard Leo failed us, despite being a great guy. We need a better process. Trump’s process was an improvement, but we can’t afford screw-ups like Gorsuch.
I support Hawley in this general statement. Leonard Leo needs to eat some crow and display some humility. If Leo can’t propose improvements himself, then he needs to get out of the picture and let someone else do the vetting.
Trump Total Circuit Judges - 53
Trump Circuit Judges with At Least 20 Democrat Votes - 11
Trump Total District Judges - 143
Trump District Judges With At Least 20 Democrat Votes - 94
The last time the Democrat Party made a mistake with ANY federal judge was 1962 - when JFK nominated centrist Byron White to the Supreme Court.
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