WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump has already appointed three Supreme Court justices. In his second term, he may well have a chance to appoint two more, creating a Supreme Court with a Trump-appointed majority that could serve for decades.
The decisive outcome saves the court from having to deal with election disputes. It also seems likely that this will change the tone of the cases before the justices, including in the areas of abortion and immigration.
The two oldest justices – Clarence Thomas, 76, and Samuel Alito, 74 – could consider retiring, knowing that Trump, a Republican, would nominate successors who may be three decades younger, and that conservative dominance of the court would continue until the would ensure by the middle of the century. or beyond.
Trump would have a long list of candidates to choose from among the more than 50 men and women he appointed to federal appeals courts, including some of Thomas and Alito’s former law clerks.
If both men were to retire, they likely would not do so immediately to minimize disruption in the courtroom. Justices David Souter and John Paul Stevens retired within a year of each other during the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency.
Thomas has said more than once that he has no intention of retiring.
But Ed Whelan, a conservative lawyer who was once a law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, wrote on the National Review’s Bench Memos blog that Thomas will realize that the best way to burnish his legacy is for a like-minded justice to replace him replaced and will retire before the midterm congressional elections.
If Thomas remains on the court until shortly before his 80th birthday in June 2028, he will surpass William O. Douglas as the longest-serving justice. Douglas was on the field for more than 36 years.
There is no guarantee that Republicans will have the majority in the Senate then, and Thomas saw what happened when one of his colleagues didn’t retire when she could have, Whelan wrote. “But it would be foolish for him to risk repeating Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s mistake—she stayed in office, then died in office, and was replaced by someone with a very different judicial philosophy,” Whelan wrote.
Ginsburg died in September 2020, less than two months before Joe Biden was elected president. Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to fill the vacancy, and the Republican majority pushed her nomination through the Senate before the election.
Barrett joined Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s other two Supreme Court nominees, Thomas and Alito, in resolving Roe v. Repeal Wade and end the nation’s right to abortion.
Along with Chief Justice John Roberts, conservatives have also expanded gun rights, ended affirmative action in college admissions, confined the Biden administration’s efforts to address climate change and weakened federal regulators by overturning a 40-year-old decision that has been since long controversial, it was the target of business and conservative interests.
The court’s landmark decision did not end its preoccupation with abortion: The justices this year also considered emergency abortion cases in states that ban and access to abortion with medication.
It is likely that the up-to-date administration will drop Biden administration guidelines requiring doctors to perform emergency abortions when necessary to protect a woman’s life or health, even in states where abortions are otherwise banned. This would end a case from Idaho that the judges sent back to the lower courts over the summer.
Access to the abortion drug mifepristone also faces a renewed challenge in the lower courts. That lawsuit could face steep odds in the lower courts after the Supreme Court upheld access to the drug earlier this year, but abortion opponents have suggested other ways a Conservative government could restrict access to the drug. That includes enforcing a 19th-century “anti-vice” law called the Comstock Act, which bans the shipment of drugs that could be used in abortions, although Trump himself has not expressed a clear position on mifepristone.
Immigration cases related to the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program are also bubbling up in court. Trump tried to end DACA in his first term but was thwarted by the Supreme Court. Now the conservative appeals court based in New Orleans is examining whether DACA is legal.
One of the first Trump-era battles before the Supreme Court involved bans on visitors from some Muslim-majority countries. The judges ultimately approved the program after two revisions.
During the election campaign, he spoke about reintroducing the travel ban.
