Justice Gorsuch fires a torpedo at Trump’s re-election – By Damon Linker (The Week) / June 15 2020
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch fired a torpedo at President Trump’s re-election campaign on Monday morning. That almost certainly wasn’t his intent, but it will be the political effect of the majority decision he authored in Bostock v. Clayton County and Altitude Express Inc. v. Zarda.
Progressives will cheer the high court’s 6-3 decision, ruling that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects gay and transgender Americans from discrimination in employment. But the fact that the majority decision was authored by Gorsuch and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, leaving just three of the court’s five conservatives in lonely dissent, will have explosive implications on the right.
During the battle for the Republican nomination in 2016, Trump at first appealed to less religious members of the party while the religious right (conservative white evangelical Protestants and conservative white Catholics) gravitated elsewhere — some to evangelical author Ben Carson, others to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, and still others to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Only after Trump had locked down the nomination and pledged to appoint judges to the federal courts who had been verified as reliably conservative by the right-leaning legal organization The Federalist Society did these crucially important groups come around to supporting the ideologically and temperamentally unorthodox (and morally repellant) nominee.
These voters stuck with Trump through the election and have become some of his most loyal supporters ever since for one reason above all others: because Trump vowed to deliver the federal courts to social conservatives. Trump made good on this promise right out of the gate by nominating conservative Gorsuch to the seat on the Supreme Court formerly held by Antonin Scalia, who died in February 2016 and whose seat Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had held open through the remainder of Barack Obama’s final year in office.
By the time Gorsuch was confirmed and McConnell began fast-tracking a series of judicial nominations to the federal courts, the religious right was firmly in the president’s pocket. That conservatives got a second nomination to the high court less than two years into the Trump administration, replacing the ideologically heterodox Anthony Kennedy with Federalist Society stalwart Bret Kavanaugh, only solidified the bond between Trump and social conservatives.
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