Donald Trump's three appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court launched a judicial revolution this year rolling back the past half-century of constitutional advancements.
The Trump-shaped right-wing majority reversed abortion rights, declared the separation of church and state dead and decided the Second Amendment blocked state concealed-carry laws, and seems poised to steer the court in an even more radical direction in next year's decisions, according to Bloomberg columnist Noah Feldman.
"What unifies this conservative revolution is a radical vision of the restoration of constitutional law to the state it was in before the liberal decisions of the Warren court created modern constitutional law more than 50 years ago," Feldman wrote. "But this conservative court doesn’t only want to roll back the clock. They also want to change how judicial decisions are made: Instead of relying on precedent and principle, they insist on using a nostalgic version of history to decide major cases. And like most forms of nostalgia, the court’s approach is less historical than pseudo-historical."
The conservative majority based their radical decisions on loosely defined "historical practices" that reflect the idealized fantasy of Trump's worldview more than the actual historic record, which numerous historians have tried to correct in filings before the court.
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"What makes this conservative majority the Trump court is of course partly the fact that Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh were appointed by Trump," Feldman wrote. "But the better reason to identify the revolutionary conservative majority with Trump is the similarity between its pseudo-historical nostalgia and Trump’s own rebarbative slogan, Make America Great Again. The MAGA ideology, at its core, is very obviously its nostalgic appeal for an English-speaking, Christian America full of manufacturing jobs for White men, homemaker status for White women, and subordinate or invisible status for people of color."
"The current conservative majority’s constitutional philosophy, like MAGA, invents an idealized past and strives to bring it back," he added. "It talks the talk of history without being responsible to reality — and without considering seriously the ways our country and our Constitution are in fact much greater now than they were in the old days. They often use the term 'historical test,' but it would be more accurate to call it a doctrine of nostalgia."
