Do you believe that government should have the right to seize somebody’s house to give to for-profit corporations? Liberal judges do, but a Republican-appointed judge probably won’t.
Do you believe free speech is a human right to be protected from government, or do you believe government can “dole out” free speech only as it chooses? Conservative judges support free speech, but liberals support the government.
Do you believe that generic prayers by public school football coaches or representations of the Ten Commandments in public courthouses as part of the history of legal codes somehow infringe on private rights? Liberal judges do, but a Republican-appointed judge probably won’t.
On racial preferences in public policy, liberal judges tend to favor them. Conservative judges don’t. On abortion, liberal judges oppose attempts to limit partial-birth skull-crushing, along with laws encouraging parental consent for minors’ abortions and ones requiring abortion clinics to abide by good medical practice laws that govern all other surgeries. Conservative judges tend to support laws ensuring these commonsense limits against radical abortion-on-demand.
Likewise, on severely restricting gun rights, letting confessed criminals off due to minor technicalities, and propping up the administrative state that mires citizens in red tape and unfair adjudications they can’t even understand, liberal judges support these things. Conservatives oppose them.
OK, let’s add a crucial disclaimer: Judges should not be deciding all those issues, or any of them, based on their personal policy preferences. All those above examples are a form of practical shorthand. What is true is that a consistent conservative interpretive framework — reading the text of the Constitution and laws as the public understood them when originally passed — tends to produce results in the real world, as described above.
Contrarily, the liberal approach of pushing “woke” modern “social justice” through a framework that treats the very words of the Constitution as if they “evolve” is what leads, in broad strokes, to the liberal side of the equation, as outlined above.
As I have argued for two decades, when conservatives fight on issues related to judges and the courts, including abortion, conservatives win. On all those results above, majorities or pluralities support the conservative approach. On how to read the Constitution — a sturdy, fixed guarantee of rights versus a document that changes as judges change — more conservatives than liberals consider this a major motivation for their votes.
On a purely political level, which is where most senators operate most of the time, all of these considerations should buck up the courage of Republicans worried about whether to fill the seat this year that was just vacated by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. At least at the margins, a fight to confirm an attractive conservative nominee will help almost all Republican Senate candidates across the country, plus put Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in some difficult positions.
The reason President Trump releases lists of potential Supreme Court nominees while Biden in cowardly fashion refuses to do so is that Trump’s nominees will help him gain more votes than he loses. Biden’s potential radical-Left nominees would cost Biden votes both in blue-collar enclaves and in professional suburbia.
Voters shouldn’t fall for the liberal media narrative that Republicans would be wrong to fill the spot this year. Republican senators should do what their voters elected them to do. If Trump’s nominee is qualified and passes ethical muster, they should confirm the choice forthwith. And voters should reward them for it.
