Those of us who follow the news and the punditry have been reading what an abject failure the Trump Administration has been. We applaud his ineptitude at enacting most of his hideous agenda.
However, nearly every pundit points to his appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the US Supreme Court as a success.
And since I haven’t bothered to get comment privileges at most of the sites where I read about this lone “accomplishment,” I’ll comment here.
The Gorsuch appointment started with a SCOTUS seat stolen from Barack Obama by Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans. It was unprecedented, at least since the Civil War era, and was nothing short of a pure power grab worthy of a third-world dictatorship.
This stolen seat is presented to Donald Trump. Being the man of dishonor and total ignorance of the Constitution and the federal government that he is, he never questioned the tainted origins of this “gift.” (Which I suppose should be expected, given that most of the money currently propping up his business empire is most likely laundered Russian mob money.)
So Trump takes this seat and takes a list of SCOTUS nominees given to him by some right-wing group and picks someone off the list. I’m certain no thought whatsoever was given to the nominee’s judicial rulings or any other conventional qualification. I’m sure Trump asked for their pictures and when he saw Gorsuch, who no doubt looks the way Trump thinks a SCOTUS justice should look (white, male, silver-haired), Trump settled on him (as he said before about one of his other nominees, “He looks like he’s from Central Casting”).
Trump appoints him and Mitch McConnell gets him approved, not incidentally by having to destroy a Senate rule that is decades old and that will further polarize both the US Senate and the country.
And so Neil Gorsuch, the man who is so pro-business and anti-employee he thinks employers should have the right to determine what birth control their employees have access to and who thinks a company is right in firing an employee who refused to freeze to death on the job, winds up on the Supreme Court of the United States.
This is as much an “accomplishment” as driving the getaway car at a successful bank heist.