Good post. I agree, except I’m a little harder on ACB than you are. Do. Not. Like. She seems like a lib to me.
I remember at the time of her nomination, I (rightly) pointed out that Trump had already screwed the pooch with his first two nominees, so we would not have a "conservative majority" regardless of how ACB turned out.
Impy told me at the time that it was pointless to dwell on his previous two SCOTUS picks, so the question is, what do you think of ACB?
I thought she clearly the "best" of Trump's three SCOTUS nominees, but given how mediocre they were overall, that's a bit like crowning Terminator 3 as the "best" of the non-James Cameron directed Terminator movies. Even if it is, that's a pretty low bar to reach.
You think she's actually a closet lib? I had the opposite feeling, I thought she was the LONE Trump nominee that DID seem to be a sincere conservative in her personal life (Gorsuch was obviously left-leaning on social issues, and Kav is wayyyy too much of a go-along, get-along beltway guy... and both of 'em were Kennedy clerks instead of clerking for an ACTUAL conservative)
I still had issues with ACB's nomination, mainly that she had a lot of oddball stuff in background, and she would be easy target for the Dems to vilify and caricature as a "crazy right-wing religious nut", and her career as a federal judge hardly showed she was some of kind of conservative intellectual powerhouse.
One thing I take into account is the cards we're dealt: Gorsuch seemed like a clear DOWNGRADE from Scalia, it was iffy if Kav would be an improvement over Kennedy, but even in a WORSE case scenario, ACB would be an improvement over Darth Bader Ginsburg. So I backed her and defended her, though my gut feeling was not happy with the pick.
In any case, she wouldn't have been my nominee, or even ended up on my short list.
I'm still holding out hope that there's about a 80% chance that ASIDE from her first action on SCOTUS, she turns out to to be a reliable conservative justice. If not, then Trump will be 0-3 on SCOTUS nominees.
But I guarantee, if there is a future GOP president, they could nominate Chelsea Clinton for SCOTUS and a bunch of useless idiots on here would IMMEDIATELY buy the idea that's she a "home run for conservatives" if the White House put out propaganda that her "judicial philosophy" is "originalist".
We've gotten decades of failures from the GOP base drinking the "anyone who claims to be strict constructionist or originalist or textulaist, or whatever they're calling it these days, will magically be awesome" kool-aid.