A historic record of appointing constitutionalists to the federal bench finally overturned Roe v. Wade.
It was November 5, 2019.
The American Spectator’s founding father, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., and Wlady Pleszczynski, our executive editor, were joined by your humble correspondent in the Oval Office for a discussion of the issues of the day with President Donald J. Trump. Also present: aides Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Brad Parscale.
A year earlier, Trump nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh had been confirmed for a Supreme Court vacancy after yet another all-out assault by the Left on a Republican judicial nominee.
As it happens, despite being a non-lawyer, as a young Reagan staffer in the Reagan White House Political Affairs Office I had participated in five Reagan-era Supreme Court battles, including the now (and then!) infamous fight over Reagan’s nomination of Judge Robert Bork.
It is fair to say that the Reagan White House was caught off guard by the all-out assault on Judge Bork by the Left. Supreme Court nominations of the past had tended to be historically routine, even boring, procedures with seriously qualified nominees winning even opposite party Senate votes. Perhaps the most famous example of the latter was the Senate’s 98-0 vote to confirm the conservative Judge Antonin Scalia, also a Reagan nominee.
But with Bork, like Scalia a brilliant judge and legal scholar, the assaults on the nominees of Republican presidents began in serious fashion. And in no time at all “Borking” as it came to be called spread down the judicial scale, with Republican presidential nominees for both the federal appeals and district courts coming under assault.
The book tells the tale of the fierce Borking-style assault on President George W. Bush’s Third Circuit nominee and sitting Reagan district appointee Judge D. Brooks Smith. Smith, after an all-out assault, was finally confirmed. That was in 2001-2002, and it was exactly the model of assault that would years later be used on Kavanaugh. Both assaults were designed to attack the personal life and legal career of the judge in question.
Thus it was a memorable moment on that November day of 2019 when Trump, in the middle of our get-together with him, called out to an aide to bring him a batch of papers he had just signed. In they came, carefully set down on the presidential Resolute desk. And what were they? Newly presidentially signed commissions for dozens and dozens of newly GOP Senate-confirmed, Trump-appointed federal judges. It was a serious accomplishment, and the president was clearly proud of it and had every right to be. By the end of his term, the president had appointed over 230 federal judges to the lower courts.
It was abundantly clear that Trump had taken seriously his pledge to Americans to bring back the federal judiciary to what its original role was supposed to be: a judicial body ruling impartially on the constitutionality of laws. He was getting it done — and then some.
That moment with Trump in 2019 comes to mind as — finally — the egregiously unconstitutional Roe v. Wade decision on abortion was, 50 years after the fact, overturned, with Trump Supreme Court nominees joining President George H. W. Bush nominee Clarence Thomas and Bush 43’s Sam Alito to get it done. Abortion is now sent back to the states — where it should have been left in the first place.
Somewhere Reagan is smiling and applauding for Trump.
