Trump campaigned on a promise to undo much of the socialist damage eight years of the Obama administration had inflicted on our nation. That was a good thing. So far, he has mostly kept that promise, another good thing. It’s not often that politicians keep their campaign promises once they are in office.
Clinton… well, what can I say that hasn’t already been said. Suffice to say she would have been a total disaster as President.
Trump is crude, bombastic, rude, abrasive, pugnacious, and perhaps even unwise in much of what he says and does. All true, but this man took a small fortune and worked it into a huge multi-billion dollar enterprise. He manages or has managed, an enormous business empire. I suspect he probably knows what he is doing regardless of his personality.
On balance, all of this may have been enough reason for me to vote for Trump. What really pushed my vote into the Trump column, though, was the death of Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia.
I think it was safe to say that up to that point the Supreme Court was in large part balanced. Many decisions had gone both toward the left and toward the right, often hinging on decisions made by Associate Justice, Anthony Kennedy. Although Kennedy was appointed to the bench by our conservative icon, Ronald Reagan, he often sided with both the conservative and liberal justices and could not be counted on to always take a strong conservative position on cases.
For most cases, the nine judges of the Supreme Court usually split evenly with four conservative judges and four liberal judges, leaving Kennedy to tilt a decision one way or the other. The absence of Scalia actually gave the liberals an advantage or could place a decision in deadlock. Since the Supreme Court is the final arbitrator of the Constitution, it is imperative to have Justices that understand their role as upholding the Constitution as it was worded and not try legislating from the bench.
Hillary Clinton would most certainly have appointed a replacement for Scalia that would have permanently tilted the court towards her liberal, socialist policies. That would have given the green light to those liberals already on the bench to interpret the Constitution far beyond the actual wording in that revered document. Obviously, one of, if not the first, target for revision would be the second amendment. Clinton had already bashed Supreme Court decisions that stated the wording in the amendment clearly said that all citizens had the right to own firearms.
President Trump has forwarded to the Senate the name of Neil Gorsuch to fill the vacancy created by the death of Scalia. It takes 60 votes in the Senate to confirm Judge Gorsuch. There are only 52 Republicans in the Senate, which means eight Democrats would need to vote to confirm this appointment. Of course, now that Harry Reid set the precedent for using the “nuclear option” to elect most appointees with a simple majority vote, this may come home to bite the Democrats in the butt. If things begin looking bad, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell always has the recourse of invoking that “nuclear option” for this appointment.
Yes, this Supreme Court appointment was the single most important reason that I voted for Donald Trump. Had Scalia not died during the election campaign, I probably would have voted this way anyhow. This merely made Trump a crucial choice for me.
