'More unhinged' Supreme Court justices will come in a second Trump term: analysis
Former President Donald Trump radically remade the United States Supreme Court when he appointed three right-wing justices who have upended American law by overturning several long-term precedents, most famously the right to an abortion that was established by Roe v. Wade.
Writing in the New York Times, former attorney Jay Willis has done a rundown of potential Trump Supreme Court picks and has found that many of them appear even "more unhinged" than the Federalist Society-approved judges whom he appointed in his first term.
As Willis documents, an updated list of prospective Supreme Court appointments "includes Kristen Waggoner, the president of the Alliance Defending Freedom, designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-gay hate group; Morse Tan, the Liberty University law school dean who once opined that abortion since Roe v. Wade 'makes the Holocaust look small by comparison'; and Mark Martin, a former state supreme court justice who is now the dean of a law school in North Carolina that has not yet been approved by the American Bar Association."
ALSO READ: 'Orange, traitorous king': Why these swing state voters are banking on Biden to beat Trump
Another prospective Trump justice is Lawrence VanDyke, whom Willis notes has been described in the past by his own colleagues as "arrogant, lazy, an ideologue and lacking in knowledge of the day-to-day practice."
Willis explains that Trump has actually soured on the Federalist Society after he felt that it wasn't supportive enough of his efforts to illegally remain in power and he's been seeking out even more outlandish options for his second term.
As for what this could mean for American law, Willis writes that their appointments "would make it even easier to overturn Warren court-era decisions that protect cherished constitutional rights" and he concludes his column by warning that "for all that Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett have done to push the law to the right, Mr. Trump’s next nominees could push it much further."