Was Samuel Alito worth the Iraq war?
Every time I hear someone say that Donald Trump’s judicial nominations make his presidency “worth it” for conservatives, I think about Alito.
It’s hard to remember because it was so long ago, but there was a moment in 2000 when conservatives blanched at the prospect of George W. Bush becoming president. He was a dynastic choice. He had a misspent youth (actually his early adulthood) during which he was, per his own euphemism, “young and reckless.” When the existence of a 1976 DUI charge—how quaint—surfaced five days before the election, masses of Republican voters abandoned him. Karl Rove later wrote that the DUI news cost Bush at least one state and possibly as many as five—and may have ultimately cost him the popular vote, too. Seriously: Republican voters used to care about that sort of thing.
But we’re all realists now and in the world of binary choices, conservatism must have been better off because Bush won, right? Sakes alive—think of the Supreme Court! Sure, John Roberts hasn’t been the stalwart conservatives hoped for, but Samuel Alito has been a fine justice. And either way, both are better than anyone Al Gore would have nominated.
Except that it’s not hard to sketch out an alternate universe where conservatism would have been better off under a President Gore because Democrats would have been pot-committed to the war against Islamic radicalism.
I don’t know about you, but I’d at least think about trading two SCOTUS seats for an opposition party that didn’t put multiculturalism over Western civilization and wasn’t looking for political advantage while covering for America’s enemies.
Of course, maybe it wouldn’t have worked out that way. If the last year has shown us anything, it’s that conservatives don’t actually believe in many of the bedrock things they say they believe in. So maybe if Gore had been president and he had prosecuted some form of war against Islamic radicalism, the Kurt Schlichters of today would be railing against the Democrats’ animosity toward orthodox religious believers and mocking them for using the U.S. military to carry out the gay-rights agenda because, you know, “liberal tears,” bitches.
So let’s take a less speculative approach and leave the Earth-2 Al Gore out of it. Whatever you think of the wisdom of the Iraq war, it carried an enormous political price for the Republican party. Iraq is responsible, almost by itself, for the waves of 2006 and 2008 which gave Democrats the House, a veto-proof Senate, and the most liberal president of the post-war era.
Which is to say that you can draw a straight line from the Iraq war to Obamacare—a program that makes it not just possible, but likely, that at some point we’re going to fully nationalize one-sixth of the U.S. economy.
Still feeling good about getting Alito on the bench? Me neither. In fact, if you offered me a trade—Alito and Roberts get replaced by garden-variety liberal jurists and in return Obamacare disappears and the single-payer genie goes back in the bottle, I’m pretty sure I’d take it. Court seats swap back and forth all the time. Fundamental aspects of our societal compact do not.
It’s worth keeping all of this in mind the next time you hear someone make the “but Gorsuch” defense of Trump.
President Trump has done some things during his first year that are obviously good: Gorsuch, but also his appointments all the way down the federal judiciary; rolling back the regulatory state; pledging to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.
These goods will come, as all politics does, at a cost. And there will be things he does that are not obviously good. You may have even noticed some of these things already. There will be a cost for them, too.
To assume that Trump is “worth it” is amazingly, willfully, shortsighted.
