Donald Trump is hoping to pitch himself as the conservative legal movement’s last best hope for securing the future of the U.S. Supreme Court. Trump says that if he’s elected president he will name committed constitutionalists to the bench and will replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia with “a person of similar views and principles.” He insists that non-liberals have “no choice” but to support him in order to prevent Hillary Clinton from packing the Court. Trump has even released a list of potential SCOTUS picks that’s chock full of Federalist Society favorites and at least onelibertarian legal hero.
But is that reason enough to support Trump in the 2016 election? I wanted to hear what the key players in the libertarian and conservative legal movements had to say about it, so I asked a group of them, including Alan Gura, the ace Second Amendment lawyer who argued and won District of Columbia v. Heller before the Supreme Court in 2008, Randy Barnett, one of the architects behind the 2012 legal challenge to Obamacare in NFIB v. Sebelius, Jonathan Adler, one of the architects behind the 2015 legal challenge to Obamacare in King v. Burwell, and Glenn Reynolds, the respected law professor who runs the popular political blog Instapundit.com. Their opinions range from denouncing Trump as “beyond the pale” to arguing that Trump’s judicial appointments “would almost certainly be better” than those of Hillary Clinton. Here are their thoughts on whether the future of the Supreme Court is a good reason to support Donald Trump.
by Damon Root
