Donald Trump’s U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh
In the chaotic, incoherent presidency of Donald Trump, there are times when it seems as if there’s no one in charge who knows up from down. But Trump’s nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court so far have been remarkably consistent in deciding exactly who’s going up and who’s going down.
There were a couple of interesting Wisconsin side issues to Trump’s nomination of Federal Appeals Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh. One was to immediately increase the danger that Wisconsin’s Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel might succeed in destroying cost reductions and other government-protected health benefits nationally. The other was the likely end of the judicial advancement of Chicago-based Federal Appeals Court Judge Diane Sykes, who’s been prominently mentioned as a possible high court nominee for more than a decade and as recently as last year’s opening under Trump.
Both developments raise larger questions about the Supreme Court even though Sykes, formerly on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, could have matched any partisan Republican extremist ever considered.
Ending Health Care?
Much of the alarm over Kavanaugh’s nomination has focused on the threat to Roe v. Wade, the 45-year-old Supreme Court decision protecting the right of a woman to decide for herself whether to give birth if she becomes pregnant based upon her own health and circumstances. But Trump’s court could go far beyond endangering women’s health to destroy access to affordable health care for everyone.
Kavanaugh’s record includes decisions explicitly hostile to both abortion rights and the Affordable Care Act (ACA). That’s particularly brazen when voters cite protecting health care as the most important issue in this year’s elections. Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell warned Trump that Kavanaugh’s record could make him harder to confirm than other candidates.
Schimel is no legal heavyweight at home, but Trump just made him one in Texas. That’s where Schimel and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton are jointly trying a federal lawsuit for 20 Republican states to destroy the ACA’s government subsidies to reduce health care costs and coverage of pre-existing conditions. If they succeed in ACA-hostile Texas, they could go before a more Trumpian Supreme Court next year visibly salivating to throw out affordable government health care.
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Schimel hasn’t had much legal presence in Wisconsin, but Sykes certainly has. She’s been Wisconsin’s most prominent potential candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court. There’d been only a few other suggestions over the years, including former Wisconsin Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson (recently deposed by conservatives) who’s not seeking re-election, and the late Terry Evans, also a former Chicago Federal Appeals Court judge.
What About Judge Sykes?
Here’s a personal disclaimer. I consider Sykes and her ex-husband, Charlie, a former right-wing radio host in Milwaukee, to be personal friends. We all worked together as journalists at The Milwaukee Journal before Diane went to law school. But I’m perfectly happy to pass up all the name-dropping that goes with knowing a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice to keep Sykes’ extreme political ideology off the nation’s highest court.
That doesn’t mean the most likely reason for Sykes’ sudden disappearance from contention isn’t disturbing. A year ago, Sykes was a finalist right up until Neil Gorsuch’s selection. The excuse Trump advisers gave for picking a white male instead was that, as a woman, Sykes would be a stronger candidate for the next vacancy. They expected that opening to be a harder fight, since it could permanently shift the balance of the court for decades.
So, Sykes remained on the list of pro-life, right-wing judges created by the ultra-conservative Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation for Trump. But, now the second vacancy went to another white male. Sykes was never mentioned as a finalist or even on longer lists of also-rans. What happened? It was a familiar pattern for Trump. He threw Sykes over for a younger woman.
During all those years of being prominently mentioned, Sykes was getting older. She’s now 60. That’s not very old in Supreme Court years, but the petty Trump has bragged about appointing justices who could be rendering decisions for the next 40 years. Add age discrimination to Trump’s notorious offenses against women. The only woman on Trump’s short list was Appeals Court Judge Amy Coney Barrett—a member of the far-right charismatic Catholic group “People of Praise” that, I’m not making this up, refer to women as “handmaids” to men. She’s 46. Kavanaugh is 53.
The reason right-wing organizations insist Trump stick to their list of preferred judges is they’ve long suspected he’s an unprincipled conman with no real political ideology other than self-aggrandizement and using the presidency to increase his own wealth. Kavanaugh, no doubt, clinched the nomination when Trump learned he’d written that presidents should be exempt from criminal investigations and indictments while in office. Cruelly punishing Trump’s political enemies—despised minorities and millions of other Americans who could lose their constitutional rights, health care and needed government services under a mean-spirited, far right-wing Supreme Court—is just gravy.
