Joel wrote this before Trump announced his choice, Brett Kavanaugh, whom I include what Joel says about him here.
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World Affairs Brief, July 6, 2018 Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World.
Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief (http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com).
DOUBTS ABOUT TRUMP’S PICKS FOR THE SUPREME COURT
As Trump’s self imposed deadline for presenting a nominee for the Supreme Court vacancy of Justice Kennedy nears, conservatives need to understand why its nearly impossible to get a true “originalist” on the bench. Reagan tried with the nomination of judge Robert Bork, and after both Republicans and Democrats in the Senate railed against Bork, Reagan gave in and presented a “conservative” jurist, Anthony Kennedy, who ended up being a swing vote that gave us a few of the Supreme Courts worst rulings. That’s the sad pattern: there will always be a minority of left/liberal Republicans in the Senate to block someone who will interpret the constitution according to its “original intent.” So, either a conservative president can continue trying and get no one confirmed, or he can give the Senate someone who will please the Left/liberal Republican holdouts. Trump’s top 3 candidates are all looking like they will be compromise justices just like Kennedy. None will overturn gay marriage or abortion, and that last litmus test wasn’t even on Trump’s list of interview questions, despite his campaign promise to appoint only anti-abortion justices.
This will be Trump’s second chance to appoint a new Supreme Court justice. His first pick, Neil Gorsuch, has been (like Justice Kennedy) good on some issues and weak on others. Frankly, any jurist who gets confirmed to the appellate courts is not going to be a strict interpreter of the original intent of the constitution. The American legal system has deteriorated into a de-facto rule-by-court-precedent rather than on the wording of the constitution, let alone “original intent.” In fact, every nominee gets grilled about whether or not they will respect existing precedents because Left/liberals know most court precedents have justified the leftward drift of law in this country.
Court precedents should never be considered “settled law.” They are interpretations of the constitution that often don’t have any basis whatsoever in the document, but are politically driven opinions that can and should be overturned.
It’s too bad we don’t have a written set of criteria that give guidance to the courts requiring that they justify every decision using direct language in the constitution, and even impose a penalty if they violate this rule. Of course, that would quickly point out the many deficiencies in the constitution’s language which is not specific enough to avoid bad interpretation. That’s why we need to know the intent of the founders to understand the general language. That intent is mostly found in the Federalist Papers. Unfortunately, the constitution doesn’t have a formal definition of a fundamental right, so leftist judges have created all kinds of new and false rights, like the right to “dignity” relied upon to justify legalization of gay marriage.
There should be penalties for ruling outside the language of the constitution—otherwise there is no penalty for violating their oath to uphold it. But that’s not likely now that conservatives are a minority in Congress and constitutional conservatives are a small percentage of that.
The bottom line is that no significant change is going to happen at the Supreme Court unless you put in a legally trained conservative who does not come through the high ranks of the courts. Trump was considering only one who meets that criteria: Senator Mike Lee of Utah.
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Brett Kavanaugh seems to be the favorite of the establishment, so that should worry conservatives. Newsmax.com a reliable pro-government “conservative” site is promoting him heavily:

Kavanaugh has an advantage because he has the most consistent conservative judicial track record of the known candidates — one that mirrors Trump’s views on several key issues, including immigration, trade deals, abortion and gun rights, according to two sources familiar with the current White House selection.

For example, Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion in Heller v. District of Columbia, which unapologetically embraced the Second Amendment and argued that judges should not re-interpret the founders’ original intent.

Actually, Heller is not as pro-Second Amendment as you think. Kavanaugh openly allowed that the “right” could be regulated or restriction by state law, and even some federal law, as long as it did not take away the right completely. That is a slippery slope.

His ruling is considered the most pro-Second Amendment opinion of any court of appeals opinion, one that has been cited repeatedly by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

But conservatives who understand government conspiracies are rightly concerned about Kavanaugh’s early association with Special Counsel Ken Starr, a Republican who was called in to cover-up for the Deep State’s murder of Vince Foster, the Clinton’s financial lawyer who knew where all of the Clinton cash was hidden overseas. As the Free Beacon wrote,

Kavanaugh, 53, is a judge on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. He first rose to national attention for his work on the Starr Report, as well as the investigation into the death of former Clinton legal counsel Vince Foster.

The Vince Foster cover-up wasn’t a simple case of an erroneous conclusion based upon weak evidence. This was a full blown conspiracy to intimidate witnesses that proved the official version was a lie. Such “active measures” cannot be done by honest FBI agents unless they know they are obstructing justice.
Vince Foster’s was killed somewhere in the nation’s Capitol and then later dumped at Fort Marcy park where it was made to look like a suicide scene. Trouble is, he had already bled out elsewhere and the supposed suicide handgun was placed in the wrong hand. Patrick Knowlton was the key witness exposing a major flaw in the official story—the fact that Foster’s car wasn’t in the park parking lot. It was in the government’s harassment of this witness that the major evidence of conspiracy lays.
Knowlton was sitting in car in the Fort Marcy parking lot at the time the government claimed Foster drove up and went into the park to kill himself. But Knowlton testified the car that was in this spot did not match Foster’s car. Federal agents also in the park tried to intimidate him into leaving, knowing that he was watching their movements.
After Knowlton went to authorities with his suspicions of foul play he began to be subjected to constant harassment by burly men trying to intimidate him on the street and in restaurants. Only when Knowlton went to give testimony at the Starr Commission did he recognized the men as Starr’s FBI agents. They were all sitting up front. As Starr’s deputy, there is no way that Kavanaugh could not have known that there was a cover-up and conspiracy going on with the treatment of Knowlton.
So, despite Kavanaugh’s conservative rulings as a judge, in my opinion, he falls into the category of a controlled judge who, like Chief Justice John Roberts, can be allowed to pursue his own conservative legal views until they need him in an “eleventh hour” crucial case to act as a swing vote. This is what happened to Roberts when he switched sides at the last minute on Obamacare.
Kavanaugh will always be subject to the blackmail of “you knew what Starr did to Knowlton, and you went along with it.” That also implies a more lethal threat of “you know what they did to Vince Foster when he got cold feet about protecting the Clintons.”
Roger Stone was on the Alex Jones show this week warning conservatives about the Kavanagh/Starr connection, which brought out the media’s long knives to undercut his warning. In this article from Patheos, the Left excoriated Stone for warning about Kavanaugh’s association with Starr when Stone admitted that even he thought Foster had committed suicide. Perhaps Stone didn’t recognize the contradictions in his view of the case —bad thinking either way.
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In summary, this is the conundrum: a truly principled judge like Robert Bork will never make it through the gauntlet of Senate confirmation hearings, and we will continue to lose liberty under “conservative” judges who can make it through the confirmation process, but who will cave in on crucial issues.
That said, Gorsuch is certainly much better than anyone a Democratic president would have picked, and Trump’s next pick will be too. Still, I predict that none of the damage in prior years will ever be undone, and the steady erosion of the constitution will continue, albeit slowly—until war comes. Then you’ll see the results of allowing NSA spying and indefinite detention upon suspicion of a crime.