RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.org/the-collapse-of-the-never-trump-conservatives/?utm
They’ll always have Twitter and MSNBC.

With the installation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, and a yet-to-be-named reliable replacement for the unreliable Anthony Kennedy, Donald Trump will have confirmed himself as the most consequential conservative president of the modern era (or a close second to Reagan if you’re nostalgic). This will be complete vindication for Trump supporters, which means it’s really the end for the so-called Never Trump conservatives. Of course, there have been so many humiliating defeats for that crowd that we are spoiled for choice. What was your favorite blunder, or blown prediction, which marked their ignominious end?

For some, it must have been in March when Bill Kristol, longtime editor of the conservative magazine the Weekly Standard, showed up in New Hampshire telling people he would run against President Trump in 2020. Or in April when the conservative website RedState was taken over and purged of writers who were “insufficiently supportive” of the president. Some go back to October 2017 when a Twitter spat broke out between Stephen Hayes and Brit Hume of Fox News over the Weekly Standard’s anti-Trumpeditorials. With the death last week of Charles Krauthammer, the revered neocon commentator and prominent Trump skeptic, the eclipse of the neocon intellectuals is complete.

One thing’s for sure: it wasn’t really a war so much as a rout. The Never Trump intellectual crowd has no momentum and no popular following these days. Consider the trajectory of their would-be leader Kristol, who appears to be indulging in a personal fantasy by putting himself forward as a candidate, as his rapport with GOP voters includes trying to run Evan McMullin in Utah to throw the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton. When that stunt failed, Kristol personally insulted the pro-Trump writer Michael Anton for his influential essay “The Flight 93 election.” Then Kristol’s commentator gig with Fox was not renewed, and he was soon accusing Tucker Carlson of “ethno-nationalism” and “racism.” Overshadowing all of these breaks was Kristol’s personal history of being the conservative’s answer to Bob Shrum, a political “pro” who was always very wrong about politics.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/anthony-kennedy-15994.html

For conservatives, the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, the Supreme Court’s longest-serving justice, offers an opportunity not seen in generations. If President Trump nominates, and the Senate confirms, a principled textualist and originalist—as he did with Justice Neil Gorsuch, a home-run appointment—the Supreme Court will have a solidly conservative majority for the foreseeable future.

Approaching his 82nd birthday, Kennedy has served on the Court more than 30 years—one of only 15 justices to reach that milestone. He has left his mark in many ways, in no small part because he has served as a “swing” justice between the Court’s conservative and liberal factions for much of his career, essentially holding the fate of the nation’s highest law in his hands.

Conservatives upset with certain results at the Court tend to focus on those areas where Kennedy leaned left—which were often civil rights cases involving groups traditionally facing societal discrimination. Kennedy will probably be best remembered for authoring each of the Court’s major opinions expanding constitutional rights for gay and lesbian Americans (Romer v. Evans (1996), Lawrence v. Texas (2003), United States v. Windsor (2013), and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015)). In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), Kennedy also teamed with fellow GOP-appointed justices Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter to write a joint opinion that preserved the basic abortion-rights holding of Roe v. Wade (1973). And he ultimately wrote the opinion that preserved much of higher education’s race-based affirmative-action apparatus (Fisher v. Texas, 2016)—even though he had argued against such programs for most of his judicial career, including in his withering dissent in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003).

But it would be a mistake to focus on these civil-rights decisions to the exclusion of Kennedy’s broader, and fundamentally conservative, jurisprudence. Along with his fellow Reagan-appointed Westerners Sandra Day O’Connor and William Rehnquist (named chief justice by Reagan), he was a fairly reliable vote for constitutional federalism, prodding the Court back toward the Founders’ structural limits on Congress. Kennedy, unlike Chief Justice John Roberts, was ready to strike down Obamacare’s individual mandate on federalist grounds in NFIB v. Sebelius (2011).