Free Republic

The lame-duck session before January will probably be President Donald Trump’s last chance to get a high court nominee confirmed by the Senate. The GOP’s sweeping losses in the midterm elections Tuesday set up an unsettling possibility for the party: If it doesn’t act now to confirm a new Supreme Court justice, it may not have another chance for years to come. That prospect is likely to ramp up pressure on the court’s two oldest conservatives — Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., 76, and Clarence Thomas, 78 — to retire during the lame-duck period, while Republicans still have the votes...

Demand Justice, a liberal organization, has mounted robust efforts to block President Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court in the past, but never before a vacancy existed. For now, none of the nine Supreme Court justices have announced plans to retire, and Mr. Trump has no looming opportunity to keep stocking the court with younger conservative justices. That isn’t stopping Demand Justice from preparing a multimillion-dollar effort to oppose potential Trump Supreme Court appointees before they happen — with a warning that Mr. Trump could be replacing two justices this year. The preparations come at a moment when Democrats are...

Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis hurried through the medieval monastery that is part of her 500-room palace. It was a chilly autumn night in Bavaria, with rain spitting outside, as she arrived at the chapel to pray. The room glowed red, lit from a crypt below where her husband and other family members lay in their coffins. The princess knelt and soft bells sounded. Her dinner guests, a British baroness and her husband, slipped in to join her as a priest led prayers. Princess Gloria, 64, who burst onto the international scene in the 1980s..as since evolved into a...