As is always the case, the media obsession with President Trump will never end. This time it is a bit different, in that both the left and the right agree on a part of Trump’s legacy in their year-end round-up stories.  Democrats and Republicans in the media agree that President Trump, combined with a Republican Senate led by Mitch McConnell, remade the Judiciary. 

From the left, Professor Noah Feldman does the typical frothing at the month unhinged liberal attack on conservative judges, President Trump, and Republicans in the Senate.  But putting aside the irrational hatred and mischaracterization, Feldman states something surprising:

2022 turned out to be the most consequential year of Donald Trump’s presidency. This year, the Supreme Court proved that its hard-right turn will be the most enduring legacy of his sorry four years in office.

Trump’s three Supreme Court appointments — the most by any president since Herbert Hoover, thanks to Mitch McConnell holding Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat open for Justice Neil Gorsuch — have launched a conservative judicial revolution that has only begun to repeal many of the major constitutional advances of the last 50-plus years. The new conservative majority is issuing decisions geared at restoring a nostalgic, never-was version of constitutional history, in place of long-established precedent. (Emphasis added.)

This morning, the United States Supreme Court heard three hours of oral argument in Moore v. Harper, a highly-charged redistricting case out of North Carolina.

How highly charged? Well, mainstream media and voting rights groups have called it the case that "threatens" to "upend democracy." But a quick look at today's arguments shows a different story.

I'll be following today's oral argument in #MooreVHarper and will do tweet thread here. For overview of issues, see my three posts: https://t.co/7dW0ukyXO9https://t.co/ln1GLw7LGjhttps://t.co/H9vISnCSBX

— Ed Whelan (@EdWhelanEPPC) December 7, 2022

Straight from the Democrat playbook: if you can’t beat ‘em, just ignore the fact that you lost.

Today, the Supreme Court vacated the Third Circuit’s horrible ruling in Ritter v. Migliori and along with it took the air out of the sails of Democrats who continue to cry wolf over commonsense election procedures.  But after the loss, of course, Democrat consigliere Marc Elias and other Democrats attempted to soften the blow.

In perhaps the most significant check on agency power in recent history, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 opinion today in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, holding that Congress did not implicitly grant the Environmental Protection Agency broad authority to devise stringent emissions caps under the Clean Air Act.

We have won our West Virginia v. EPA case at the Supreme Court. Huge victory against federal overreach and the excesses of the administrative state. This is a HUGE win for West Virginia, our energy jobs and those who care about maintaining separation of powers in our nation.

— Patrick Morrisey (@MorriseyWV) June 30, 2022

The past week has been a good week for both Republicans and open, fair, and honest elections.  It has also been a downright bad and ugly week for the Democrat Party’s consigliere, Marc Elias.  

First, the good: Yesterday, a New York Supreme Court Judge ruled that (like virtually everywhere else in the world) you have to be a citizen to vote in New York City:

Staten Island Supreme Court Justice Ralph Porzio also issued a permanent injunction that bars the city Board of Elections from letting around 800,000 non-citizen residents register to vote.

In a 13-page ruling, Porzio said city officials can’t “obviate” restrictions in the state constitution, which “expressly states that only citizens meeting the age and residency requirements are entitled to register and vote in elections.”

“There is no statutory ability for the City of New York to issue inconsistent laws permitting non-citizens to vote and exceed the authority granted to it by the New York State Constitution,” he wrote.

The Supreme Court held today in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District that when life gives you Lemon [v. Kurtzman], you strike it down for good.  This notoriously troublesome Establishment Clause test, which Justice Scalia likened to “some ghoul in a late-night horror movie” that somehow keeps coming back to life, is conclusively and finally dead.   

Religious liberty wins again at the Supreme Court this term, and today’s opinion ensures it will continue to do so in the future.

As the liberal justices grow older and as the conservative majority decides an increased number of controversial cases, the Supreme Court is feeling more pressure from the Left. The Justice feeling it the most is Justice Stephen Breyer. Despite Justice Breyer generally championing the viewpoints of the Left, many are pressuring him to retire so the President can nominate a younger justice to replace him.

If you listened to the most recent meeting of President Biden’s Commission on the Supreme Court and knew nothing prior, the liberal “scholars” would have you convinced that the Supreme Court is hated by all Americans.  The reality is that the Judicial Branch is the most popular branch of the United State Government.  The real purpose of Biden's Judicial Commission is to undermine the judiciary's popularity and to further intimidate the current Supreme Court.  As Dan McLaughlin writes in National Review Online:

The Court-packing debate has cooled off for a while since prominent Democrats introduced legislation in April to pack the Court with new justices for nakedly partisan and ideological purposes. Democrats are happy to move the question offstage. Court-packing is a massively unpopular and dangerous proposal, just as it was in 1937. At the moment, Democrats don’t have the votes in the Senate to break a filibuster, and they do not appear to have 50 votes for passage, either. But they have not abandoned the implied threat that they might bring it back if they get a bigger Senate majority or if the Supreme Court does something they dislike enough.

On this day in 1937, the Senate put an end to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's court packing plan. Commentary from The Heritage Foundation explains:

Many Americans may have heard about how President Franklin Roosevelt’s proposed court-packing scheme failed in the 1930s. During Roosevelt’s first term, the Supreme Court struck down several laws enacted to address the Great Depression because they exceeded Congress’ power.

On Tuesday, the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States held its third meeting and 2nd round of hearings since being formed by President Joe Biden earlier this year. The meeting consisted of 6 panels of experts that commissioners questioned about various proposals for changes to the Court.  This one was much more partisan then the first two with progressive panelists making outrageous claims.  However, Harvard Professor Stephen Sachs summed up the commission well:

The public will see through efforts to recast court-packing as “court expansion,” jurisdiction-stripping as “jurisdiction channeling,” and so on. It will see through efforts to pursue short-term partisan payback under the guise of long-term reform. And because legitimacy is a two-way street, reforms that are not perceived by both sides as enhancing the courts’ legitimacy will never succeed in doing so.