The confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is possibly Donald Trump’s last achievement as president, and perhaps his greatest.
Tens of millions of Americans voted for Trump so that he would appoint conservative judges. And he has kept his promise to the full.
Barrett joins Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch as Trump appointees on the Supreme Court and cements a 6/3 conservative majority on the court.
Barrett is a devout Catholic, a mother of seven and is personally opposed to abortion.
This endears her symbolically to millions of American Christians.
However, these are not the impulses which will drive her decision making as a judge.
Rather, she is a legal and constitutional conservative.
She is an originalist and a textualist. She interprets the constitution as it was written and she interprets legislation as it is written.
In practice this means she is extremely unlikely to use the court as a mechanism for legislating social policy and conformity to contemporary social ideas on the basis of discovering new meanings in the constitution or stretching the meaning of legislation.
That does not mean she will always rule in favour of the Trump administration or in favour of politically conservative causes.
One of the first decisions of the earliest Trump appointee to the court, Neil Gorsuch, was to rule against the Trump administration on a non-discrimination issue.
The Democrats were very smart in the personally respectful way they dealt with Barrett during her impressive Senate confirmation hearings.
They understood that a full out culture wars assault on Barrett, of the kind they mounted viciously against Kavanaugh, would motivate Trump voters hugely.
It would also have been absurd to demonise so patently decent a person as Barrett who, with her husband, adopted two orphan children from Haiti.
When Barrett in 2017 was confirmed as an appeals judge, Democrat Senator Diane Feinstein famously told Barrett, in connection with her religious beliefs, that “the dogma lives loudly in you”. That, Feinstein said, was a concern.
A repeat of that approach by Democrats could have been catastrophic for Joe Biden’s candidacy. In 2016 a small majority of Catholics voted for Trump. This time polls indicate a small majority will vote for Biden. Even Catholics who do not share Barrett’s conservative views would have been angry if she had been demonised on the basis of her faith.
The Democrats avoided that trap carefully and sensibly. Feinstein this time went out of her way to treat Barrett with courtesy and consideration, often praising the presence of Barrett’s husband and children at the hearing. So much so that some Democrats criticised Feinstein for lending legitimacy to the process.
The Kavanaugh confirmation was in some ways the high point of the Trump presidency. Trump stuck with Kavanaugh through a vicious battle and won a significant victory for his supporters.
Biden won’t rule out “packing” the court, which means increasing its size to secure a liberal majority.
But the court has had nine justices for 150 years. Increasing it for political purposes would be a much more savage debauching of American institutions than anything Trump has done so far. It may be that Biden hopes the mere threat of packing the court will make it more amenable to his general outlook if he becomes president, which is what happened when Franklin Roosevelt made similar threats.
But that’s all for the future. Barrett’s confirmation is the best day Trump has had in a long while.
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