Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement on Wednesday, which is good news for President Donald Trump. No matter how many porn stars Trump pays or longstanding allies and trading partners he needlessly alienates or essential institutions he seeks to undermine, his die-hard defenders can always make the strong argument to pre-Trump conservatives such as ourselves that we’re better of with him making Supreme Court picks rather than that awful Hillary Clinton woman.
Trump got his first chance to pick a Justice because Republican Senate majority leader Sen. Mitch McConnell — now widely reviled by the Trump-ian party as a squishy establishment type — ruthlessly held the seat open through the last year of President Barack Obama’s second term following the death of reliably conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, and Trump’s choice of the equally rock-ribbed Justice Neil Gorsuch further endeared him to his loyal supporters and earned begrudging praise from his party’s last skeptics. Kennedy’s retirement gives Trump an opportunity to replace him with someone even more rock-ribbedly conservative, and although we’re sure he’d appoint his abortion-loving appellate judge sister or idiot-sin-law to the seat if he thought he could get away with it, we’re also sure he’s shrewd enough that he’ll once again let the Heritage Foundation choose someone the fans will love and the conservative skeptics will begrudgingly respect and the Democrats can’t come up with any persuasive beyond-the-pale arguments about.
Kennedy was appointed to the court by President Ronald Reagan and confirmed with unanimous Republican support and several Democratic votes in the Senate, and he was not a judicial activist type who thought that whatever the consensus of liberal opinion believed was constitutional, but neither was he a reliably conservative vote in controversial cases. He acquired a reputation as the rare “swing vote” on the Supreme Court, and for whatever idiosyncratic reasons he frequently wound up on the winning side of many five-to-four decisions that wound up outraging the left some of the time and the right some of the time. In his final session he provided Trump with some much-needed five-to-four wins on the travel ban and a California case involving the free speech rights of anti-abortion advocates and another matter about the power of public unions, but his replacement will likely provide both the Trump-ian and pre-Trump conservatives with even more five-to-four wins over the coming decades.
There’s already concern on the left that the Supreme Court might even undo the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that found a right somewhere in the penumbra of the Constitution for abortion in the first trimester and exceedingly complicated cases afterwards, which is well past the panic by point even by the left’s panicky standards, but they don’t have much power to stop it. They’ll put up a good fight in the Senate confirmation process, and do whatever they can with the filibuster rules the Republicans used to rely on in their days on the political desert, and make a not-quite-convincig argument that because Obama’s appointment had to await the next presidential election Trump’s pick should await the next mid-term election, but they’ll wind up with Trump winning a more conservative Supreme Court for a long while.
As much as we hate to see it redound to Trump’s political benefit, that’s fine with us. We’ve always believed the Constitution says what the words written in it say, and not whatever the current consensus of liberal opinion is, and we have to admit we do shudder to think of the nominees that awful Clinton woman would have chosen. If Trump’s picks prove the strict constructionists the Heritage Foundation claims they are they’ll probably uphold a special counsel subpoena of the president, and even if the Court does undo Roe v. Wade it will just set off 50 state legislative battles and countless street brawls which the rather recent and obviously insincere pro-life convert Trump will mostly lose.
No matter how stellar a pick the Heritage Foundation comes up with, however, we’ll still be infuriated by almost everything else Trump is doing.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 
Fortunately there weren’t more Trump hating so called “old fashioned” conservative Republicans that wasted their 2016 vote, or Hillary Clinton would be appointing her second Supreme Court justice.