Editor’s Note: This analysis was excerpted from the February 18 edition of CNN’s Meanwhile in America, the daily email about US politics for global readers. Sign up here to receive it every weekday morning.
It’s a cliché no US presidential candidate can resist: “This election is the most important in our lifetime.” But this year it might be true, because also on the ballot is the destiny of the Supreme Court, which decides where America stands on issues like abortion, gay rights and guns.
If given a second term, US President Donald Trump could leave a generation-long legacy on the highest bench in the land. He has already built a conservative majority in its marble-pillared court, with two lifetime appointments of Supreme Court justices. Over the next four years, he may have opportunities to replace two elderly liberal justices – Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 86, and Stephen Breyer, 81.
The American right would be triumphant: With an unassailable 7-2 rightwing majority, abortion rights could be stripped away, lax gun laws loosened further, climate and racial integration legislation gutted and corporations unleashed. And such success would raise the prospect of a larger looming struggle: an increasingly diverse, secular and liberal nation constrained by a Supreme Court that is mostly white, religious and socially conservative.
Conservative social and legal groups have worked shrewdly for decades to reshape the federal judiciary in their image. And while the truly god-fearing might frown at Trump’s ways, lies and multiple marriages, he’s been as good as his word on judges, faithful to the alliance that helped put him in power.
Given the stakes, you’d expect Democratic candidates to obsess over the Supreme Court. But they lavish far more attention on health care, income inequality and climate change. Ultimately, the Supreme Court will shape those issues too – all the more reason for Democrats to consider dipping into the conservative playbook.