I would have much preferred Barbara Lagoa. Cuban Americans understand what happens if we let things drift left.
Kavanaugh and Barrett are much too stare decisis for me. Kavanaugh wrote a whole book about it which everyone ignored.
I think Trump was going after the anti-abortion sentiment. Also, everyone seems to think women with a lot of children are indisputably conservative.
And looks. They are all picture perfect. He was going after public opinion with that and other things.
But it is hard in a way to learn all about each nominee in a strictly legal sense.
I agree with you on Kav being way too much of a “stare decisis” guy for me to trust him. It was that reason I didn’t like the nominee, I think he will refuse to overturn “landmark” liberal “precedents” like gay marriage and the “right” to an abortion because of that. Susan Collins even said she was voting FOR Kavanaugh because of that. Bizarrely, a bunch of conservatives on our side applauded her for saying that. A pro-abortion Senator votes for a judge because she thinks he’s pro-abortion, and a bunch of conservatives think it’s great. Cue Twilight Zone music….
ACB using her maiden name as her middle name and adopting a bunch of kids from third world countries (I know a couple from my Catholic parish that did the latter), strike me as more “eccentric” that a warning sign that she is secretly “not conservative”. Though you do have a good point that liberal women tend to pretentiously use their maiden name as a middle name, e.g. Hillary Rodham Clinton. I don’t know anyone personally who does that, it would be weird if women in my family used their maiden name as a middle name. In any case, RINO Collins being AGAINST ACB was more evidence for me that she was “more conservative” than Kav.
Much more of a warning sign for me was Gorsuch being raised Roman Catholic and switching to Episcopalian as an adult. 95% of the people who do so go that direction because they dislike the Catholic church’s conservative views on social issues, so they switch to Episcopalian since its 90% identical to the church they grew up in, except it has liberal stuff like they want like women “priests” and marrying gays. While there are probably a handful of conservatives who switched from Catholic to Episcopalian, I have yet to see any examples of one. Worse, there are two Episcopalian churches in Gorsuch’s hometown of Boulder, Colorado, and Gorsuch and his wife attend the far MORE liberal of the two, happily sitting the pews every Sunday listening to an insane SJW “womyn pastor” who preaches the virtues of gun control and tree hugging. A bunch of FReepers shrugged it off and said Gorsuch’s private life didn’t matter one bit since he said they wanted to hear in public. I said if they truly believed that, then they owed Barack Obama an apology for attacking him for associating with Jeremiah Wright and Trinity UCC for years. Sure enough, Gorsuch is showing his true colors now and does indeed appear to be socially liberal, just as I predicted he would be.
I had issues with Barbara Lagoa too, she wouldn’t have ended up on my short list, either. Trump’s vaulted “list” that FReepers had been crowing about since 2016 had a lot of lemons on it. As others have noted, a big problem was the narrow range of candidates, with 95% of them being ivy league elites from Harvard or Yale, and career federal judges & Bush cronies. Trump needed to think outside the box (for example, Rehnquist was a Lutheran and the no. 3 guy in the justice department, he had never spent a day on his life on the federal courts before he was named to SCOTUS). A lot of the actual, PROVEN solid conservatives, like Charles Canady and Jennifer Elrod, never ended up on Trump’s “list” of “good” candidates. And remember all that “vote for Trump and we’ll get Ted Cruz on SCOTUS” talking point they used to “sell” Trump in the primary, which the Cruz haters on FR now admit was BS? Lame.
Ultimately, I think his legacy on SCOTUS appointments will probably be one of the weakest areas of his presidency, if Trump ends with Eisenhower-like SCOTUS judges for decades, I don’t think history will be too kind to his “accomplishments” on the Supreme Court.