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But they didn't, is the thing. Promises and promises: "jam yesterday and jam tomorrow but never jam today".
I was astounded by the Roe vs Wade decision, because holy hannah the Trump judges really had done it! This was one of the campaign promises that Trump could have dropped in a heartbeat because nobody really expected anything to come of it, if past Republican administrations were any indication, and he did it. Wow.
"But they didn't, is the thing"
I really don't get your model of the government. The reason Trump got a bunch of justices is because three justices died. He got lucky. The reason other Republicans did not appoint three justices is because they did not have enough justices die. I don't get what you think any other Republican should have done, or how you think pre-Trump Republicans failed us.
Trump deserves no credit for Ginsburg, Scalia, and Kennedy dying. That was never about him, that was about them being old.
Trump's also fairly pro-choice for a Republican, so Dobbs is a weird thing to list as an achievement of his for that reason.
Tell that to Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Sure, any guy with an R beside their name could just have their pick waved through, no bother! Trump was just lucky!
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Previous Republican appointees defected on abortion a lot. It’s probably not trumps fault directly that he didn’t appoint a Sandra day O’Connor, but you can make a case that Roberts’s sudden turn to the right was trumps doing and that bush wouldn’t have appointed ACB.
Reagan got three picks and two of them were O'Connor and Kennedy. Kennedy wasn't entirely his fault - if there had been a Republican Senate majority he would have got Bork - but I think a pro-lifer could reasonably say that there were plenty of candidates without Bork's Watergate baggage who would have been both confirmable and a more reliable pro-life vote than Kennedy.
Bush Sr put Souter on the Court. 'Nuff said. Admittedly he had to get his nominee through a Democrat-controlled Senate, but given he could get Thomas confirmed with he could presumably have managed better than Souter. (FWIW, I think the Senate still had a right-wing majority at the time given the existence of conservative Southern Democrats like Richard Shelby and Sam Nunn)
Bush Jr only got two picks, which is unlucky for a two-term President, and one of them was Roberts, who movement conservatives hate for good reasons and who was never going to be the fifth vote to overturn Roe, even if he was willing to be the sixth. Alito was a good conservative pick, but Bush had to be dragged kicking and screaming into nominating him - his first choice was Harriet Miers.
Trump was lucky to get three picks, but he managed to make all three count (at least on abortion). The Republican Senate majority helped a lot, but Bush Jr had that. If the filibuster was still in place for SCOTUS nominees his nominees would have been filibustered, but the reason why the filibuster lasted as long as it did was as part of an unwritten set of rules where candidates like Thomas and Alito didn't get filibustered - in other words the removal of the filibuster reversed the effect of increased partisanship in the Senate, rather than making life easier for Trump to get nominees through.
If you are the kind of movement conservative whose main issue is judges, Trump was a great President, and deserves re-election. If the next President is a Republican, Alito and Thomas will retire during his term. Given the record of establishment Republicans, Nicky Haley would appoint replacements who would move the Court to the left, and DeSantis can't be trusted not to do the sane.
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