Popular-vote loser Donald Trump is already thinking about getting his grubby, short fingers on as many Supreme Court seats as possible, and is planning not just for the immediate vacancy that Mitch McConnell has held open for him since last February, but the next possible vacancies as well.
Trump’s team wants to make filling the seat held by the late Justice Antonin Scalia one of the earliest acts of his presidency, according to multiple transition officials, in hopes of scoring an energizing and unifying victory for the conservative movement.
And as Trump weighs perhaps the most enduring personnel decision he’ll make as president-elect — filing one of only nine lifetime seats on the high court — he has sought input from an array of friends, former rivals, and legal and TV personalities.
“He clearly understands he may have a chance to define the court for a generation or more and he is taking it very seriously,” said former Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump confidante.
While Scalia’s seat is the only current opening, Trump’s advisers are plotting how to fill that vacancy in tandem with the next one — a slot if vacated by a liberal justice like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 83, or swing-vote Justice Anthony Kennedy, 80, could far more dramatically move the court’s political center of gravity to the right.
Trump went into this with two top choices—William Pryor and Diane Sykes—both unfit to serve and both high on the list of extremist Republican groups. One of these "unabashedly rock-ribbed replacement" candidates, the thinking is, would be hard for Democrats to fight since they would be replacing the same in Scalia. But while they're conducting this search, the Trump team is also looking for a conservative—probably a woman—to replace either of the next two likely vacancies, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 83, or swing-vote Justice Anthony Kennedy, 80.
All this comes with a warning to Democrats, voiced by Curt Levey of the Koch brothers' Freedomworks and the Committee for Justice. "I think Democrats would be foolish to go all out when we're replacing Scalia. […] On Ginsburg, you fight to the death and Kennedy, it would be close to a fight to the death. So, why have a fight to the death now, when you're probably going to lose?" There's also the threat of McConnell going nuclear with a SCOTUS fight, and removing the filibuster on these nominees.
Those are warnings Democrats need to ignore. They need to fight every unqualified nominee that comes before them, with every tool they've got. They need to remember how we got here, with Scalia's seat still vacant since February because Republicans refused to fill it, and fight with equal resolve.