Far-right pundit Pat Buchanan argues in his syndicated column today that Christian conservatives in Alabama should elect Roy Moore in order to help President Trump and Senate Republicans complete an ideological takeover of the federal judiciary.
“Today, the GOP, holding Congress and the White House, has a narrow path to capture the Third Branch, the Supreme Court, and to dominate the federal courts,” he writes.
Buchanan praises Sen. Charles Grassley for single-handedly abolishing the Senate’s “blue slip” procedure to make it easier for Trump to pack the federal appeals courts with right-wing ideologues. “Thus have the skids been greased for a conservative recapture of the federal judiciary unseen since the early days of FDR,” Buchanan exults, adding:
Eighteen of the 179 seats on the U.S. appellate courts and 119 of the 677 seats on federal district courts are already open. More will be opening up. No president in decades has seen the opportunity Trump has to remake the federal judiciary.
Not only are the federal court vacancies almost unprecedented, a GOP Senate and Trump are working in harness to fill them before January 2019, when a new Congress is sworn in.
The mention of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt suggests what other conservatives have said openly: Right-wing strategists are hoping that a judiciary packed by Trump with Federalist Society-approved judges will not only roll back Obama-era policies, but will rule that Great Society and New Deal programs are unconstitutional.
In February, Buchanan responded to judicial rulings against Trump’s executive orders on immigration by calling for Trump to “break judicial power.” In his new column he says Trump and the Senate are both “indispensable if we are to end judicial dictatorship in America,” adding that “2018 is the crucial year.”
If the election in Virginia this year is a harbinger of what is to come, GOP control of Congress could be washed away in a tidal wave in 2018.
Hence, this coming year may be a do-or-die year to recapture the Third Branch of Government for conservatism.
Which is why that Dec. 12 election in Alabama counts.
