On this day five years ago, Scott made a list of graded predictions for how the next five years would pan out. How did he do?
He correctly predicted that Democrats would win the presidency in 2020. He correctly predicted that the UK would leave the EU and that no other country would vote to leave. He seemed under the impression that Ted Cruz would rise up to take Trump's mantle, but to my mind the only person in the Republican party who has a meaningful chance of opposing Trump is DeSantis. I think a lot of the technological predictions were too optimistic (specifically the bits about space travel and self-driving vehicles) but I don't work in tech and amn't really qualified to comment.
Near the end of the article, in a self-deprecating moment, he predicts with 80% confidence that "Whatever the most important trend of the next five years is, I totally miss it". To my mind, the most significant "trend" (or "event") of the last five years was Covid, and I think he actually did okay on this front: the second-last section of the article is a section on global existential risks:
Global existential risks will hopefully not be a big part of the 2018-2023 period. If they are, it will be because somebody did something incredibly stupid or awful with infectious diseases. Even a small scare with this will provoke a massive response, which will be implemented in a panic and with all the finesse of post-9/11 America determining airport security.
- Bioengineering project kills at least five people: 20%
- …at least five thousand people: 5%
Whether you think those two predictions cames to pass naturally depends where you sit on the lab leak hypothesis.
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Notes -
I don't think anybody, even pro-lifers, really expected any change on Roe vs Wade. "Republicans run on doing something about it; Democrats run on 'Republicans are gonna do something about it'; nobody does anything about it no matter who wins" is how it went for the recent past. That we got the Trump Supreme Court and they did do something about it when he was out of office was a big surprise to everyone.
I certainly didn't expect it. I thought it's a bad decision (original RvW, not the reversal), but I didn't think SCOTUS would dare to revert it. I underestimated them. Since I am by nature rather skeptical and pessimistic, being wrong in that direction once in a while makes me actually feel better.
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That's not really the full picture, from the American pro-life perspective. As a grassroots movement, it was very far from fringe: solid majority position in the Republican party, and a minority position among Democrats--until the fallout from Obamacare hit, there was a small caucus of pro-life House Democrats, though it's gone now. Prior to Dobbs, the controlling precedent was Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, which functionally replaced RvW--of note, the "Casey" that PP was suing was the pro-life Democrat Governor of Pennsylvania.
When you're talking about the Supreme Court, it's got few enough members that you might as well refer to the individuals rather than aggregating trends. Roe/Casey would have been overturned decades ago, if not for a string of Republican appointees that refused to pull the trigger--Kennedy, O'Connor, Souter, and Roberts. At least publicly, their appointing presidents (Reagan, GHWB, GWB) made common cause with the pro-life movement, and promised to appoint originalist justices, except oops...oops...oops.... Even then, each of those presidents did appoint justices who either were part of the Dobbs majority, or would have been if they'd still been on the Court (Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, Alito). Trump was unusual in that all of his appointees joined Dobbs, instead of just half.
So, yes, Dobbs was a "big surprise to everyone," but only in the sense that the pro-life movement had decades of experience supporting candidates that ultimately betrayed them, and expecting Trump's vetting to succeed where Reagan's, GHWB's, and GWB's did not looked like starry-eyed optimism at best.
It's especially surprising given Trump is generally terrible at vetting people. A lot of his appointments ended up undermining him, getting into very public fights with him or doing something very different from what he wanted them to do. Maybe this one time he listened to the right advice.
Overall, yes, Trump's vetting was at best a mixed bag--though I'll note that failures in this area tend to be more spectacular than successes. But in the case of judicial nominations in particular, there's more to the story.
When Trump entered the 2016 primaries, it was plainly obvious that he was--on paper--a very bad fit with the sizable chunk of the Republican base that was some combination of Southern, Evangelical, and Conservative. In a way, the obviousness of this problem was an advantage, in that it could not be ignored and required a strategy. This cohort was extremely sensitive to betrayal on judicial matters, as noted above. So Trump did two things--he publicly announced a short list for candidates to the Supreme Court, so that they could be vetted in advance, and he appointed Leonard Leo, the executive VP of the Federalist Society, to oversee the selection of nominees. While Trump made the final calls, Leo was the one preparing the short list.
Two of the three appointments to SCOTUS that Trump made were due to the death in office of Justices Scalia and Ginsberg. The third was the carefully negotiated retirement of Justice Kennedy. Prior to Kennedy's retirement, Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch--a former Kennedy clerk--to replace Scalia, and then appointed Brett Kavanaugh--another former Kennedy clerk--to replace Kennedy himself. Both were considered more conservative than Kennedy, who was often the deciding vote, though Gorsuch more than Kavanaugh.
None of Trump's Supreme Court nominees were close to Trump himself--all three were previously-established, well-respected members of the federal judiciary, with resumes to match. While all three would generally be considered somewhat more conservative than the combination of Kennedy, O'Connor, Souter, and Roberts, they are also on average more centrist than Thomas and Alito. (This is something of an oversimplification--all of the justices mentioned have independent streaks. Indeed, prior to Ginsberg's death, every single one of the conservative justices had formed a five-justice majority with the four liberals in separate cases. The liberal justices vote together more often on average, but it's not uncommon to see splits in any of the "voting blocs" that analysts might describe.)
It's true (though not very often discussed) that SCOTUS judges not always vote in partisan blocks, but as I understood where it happens is mostly technical cases (which usually constitute the bulk of the work and are sparsely covered because they are incomprehensible to a regular person and can bore one to death). For high-stakes politicized cases, unless it's something obvious, usually one can predict the split by partisan lines.
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Supposedly, Trump's SC picks were from a list created by a group whose whole purpose is figuring out which people would be best for overturning RvW, but then, wasn't that also true for prior Republican SC picks?
Perhaps the highest levels of the Republican party didn't actually want Roe v Wade overturned, because they thought they'd be a dog that catches the car and would just be screwing themselves over electorally. And that changed with Trump since he just does his own thing.
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