Trump’s plans for the US Supreme Court are pretty terrifying
(Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
President-elect Donald Trump has some terrifying plans to fill potentially upcoming vacant seats on the US Supreme Court.
Trump is already making plans to fill the US Supreme Court seat vacated when staunchly anti-LGBT justice Antonin Scalia died last February.
The President-elect is planning how to fill a seat which could be vacated by liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is 83 and has had some health issues in the past.
Or another seat could be vacated by swing justice Anthony Kennedy, 80, who authored the opinion on same-sex marriage back in 2015.
“He clearly understands he may have a chance to define the court for a generation or more and he is taking it very seriously,” former Speaker Newt Gingrich, says.
It is expected that Trump could put forward a conservative female justice who would be more difficult for Senate Democrats to attempt to oppose.
Trump’s shortlists of potentials to fill Supreme Court seats is filled with staunchly conservative figures.
He has even considered appointing William H Pryor Jr, who has in the past suggested that same-sex couples should be punished with jail for having sex in their own homes. Mr Pryor has also been forced to deny that he posed nude for gay porn while a student.
The former Alabama Attorney General defended a law in 2003 in Texas which criminalises consensual gay sex, comparing it to “polygamy, incest, pedophilia, prostitution, and adultery”.
Arguing that LGBT people were not protected by the US Constitution, Pryor said in a legal brief about the law that states should be able to criminally charge gay people for having sex.
“The Supreme Court has never recognised a fundamental right to engage in sexual activity outside of monogamous heterosexual marriage, let alone to engage in homosexual sodomy,” wrote Pryor.
“Such a right would be antithetical to the ‘traditional relation of the family’ that is ‘as old and as fundamental as our entire civilisation’.”
Bader Ginsburg previously clashed with Trump, in July telling the New York Times that she didn’t “want to contemplate” what would happen to the highest court in the US if he won.
“I can’t imagine what this place would be — I can’t imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our president…For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be — I don’t even want to contemplate that,” she said.
Trump tweeted about Bader Ginsburg, who has been a strong ally to the LGBT+ community, responding to her comments suggesting she is not sound of mind.
Many have speculated on what a new conservative member of the Supreme Court would mean for America.
But Justice Bader Ginsburg appears to have silently sent a message to Trump using her choice of collar.
Ginsburg has long supported equality, and attracted fury from conservatives for performing same-sex weddings herself ahead of last year’s Supreme Court ruling which legalised same-sex marriage.
