Editors at National Review Online suggest that former President Donald Trump ought to release a new list of prospective federal judicial appointments.
Two of the unprecedented things Donald Trump did in 2016 were to release a list of potential Supreme Court picks and to win the presidency. The first of those was essential to the second. If he wants to win and govern successfully, he should do it again.
In 2016, the list served a particular purpose: Because Trump had never served in government and had little record of engagement with political ideas or activism, it helped fill in the blanks for voters. The list offered a concrete sense of what sort of jurists Trump would elevate on the federal bench. It was a decided improvement over his first instinct, which had been to tout his liberal sister as a potential justice. The names were distinguished and notably faithful to the text and original meaning of the Constitution. That, along with the selection of Mike Pence as his running mate, reassured many skeptical conservatives that a vote for Trump would ensure a worthy successor to the Supreme Court seat vacated by Antonin Scalia.
While the list was a break with norms from a more reticent age, it was a healthy one for democratic transparency in light of the outsized role the Court plays today, both in presidential elections and in deciding what the elected branches will be permitted to do. It is ultimately the voters who are responsible for preserving our Constitution, and they deserve to know what sort of hands they will be leaving it in. Offering a representative list of jurists is surely superior to what Joe Biden did in 2020, which was to promise to limit his choices in selecting the next justice to black women — offering voters only the race and gender of his next justice but nothing from which to evaluate considerations such as judicial philosophy, temperament, or qualifications.
