The OSHA Ruling Alone Made Trump's Presidency Worth It
I used to berate those who cited the Supreme Court as reason enough to vote for Trump in 2016. On Thursday I was proven wrong.
How were we expected to trust a man who had made such questionable statements on the most red meat Republican issues? He had supported the ‘94 assault weapons ban and had said that he was “very pro-choice.” Yet all around me the enthusiasm couldn’t have been higher within my party for Donald Trump. “He’s a wild card! He’ll sure make it interesting!” These are the kinds of statements I heard daily from the potential caucus-goers of Southern Nevada while knocking doors in support of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul in the winter of ‘15/’16.
“Yeah, that’s the problem.” I thought, and occasionally vocalized. Why didn’t these people want a real ideologue? The kind of man so staunchly guided by principle that you could literally make up an issue and know exactly how he’d respond to it. Let’s say for example that a highly contagious respiratory virus of suspicious origins were to come out of China during the next administration and sweep its way through the world. Wouldn’t you want to not have to wonder how your president would react?
Those were my thoughts anyway, and unfortunately they weren’t shared by the majority of primary voters in my party. But for better or worse, here we are. I did eventually end up coming around on President Trump. While I wish he would have paid more attention to our nation’s skyrocketing debt, I didn’t love his tariff-happy approach to trade policy, and I sure wish he didn’t surround himself with swampy, washed up Bush-era hacks who hated him like Jeff Sessions and John Bolton, I found his mixed bag of a presidency to be a net positive for freedom. We slashed the regulatory state, gave a great tax cut to low and middle-income Americans, and ended much of our entanglement in the Middle East that had been going on since I was in grade school.
Perhaps most importantly, though, we appointed three new Supreme Court justices. Once the dust was settled in the primaries and Trump had emerged the victor, this was one of those issues that I scolded my fellow Republicans on, telling them they had made a huge mistake and Trump was going to sell us all down the river, just like on gun rights and protections for the unborn. Again, he wasn’t an ideologue. This guy wasn’t going to nominate Andrew Napolitano to the Supreme Court like Rand would have!
We’re now two weeks to flatten the curve years into the COVID-19 pandemic, and Joe Biden is using OSHA to try and coerce American workers into taking a vaccine that offers little to no protection against infection or transmission of the current dominant strain of the virus. What a mess. After a slough of lies from the Democrat-appointed justices (and Chief Roberts) about the virus and the vaccine during oral arguments, they decided to judge this policy based on whether they thought the measure was a good idea, rather than on its constitutionality (as progressives tend to do).
The sad truth of the matter is that we could have had three more of them were it not for the Trump presidency that most Republicans (and many ignored, dejected, unaffiliated Americans who do not regularly vote at all) decided to roll the dice on in 2016. Little did we know it at the time, but we were less than 100,000 riled up rust belt residents away from a result that would have left a quarter of Americans being stripped of their bodily autonomy if they wanted to put food on their tables. Perhaps this is what the talking heads in corporate media mean when they tell us every two to four years that this is the “most important election of our lifetimes.” The truth is that hindsight is 20/20, and you never find out until years later how consequential it really was.
I don’t mean to imply that President Trump’s picks were perfect. Obviously Justice Kavanaugh was a huge disappointment yesterday when it came to the ruling on the the HHS mandate that affected 20 million healthcare workers. Our hospitals are already short-staffed, and the state of Rhode Island is showing just how much this isn’t about public safety by allowing vaccinated healthcare workers to come to work while actively testing positive for COVID. Justice Barrett disappointed last August when she granted “public” universities the ability to deny the unvaccinated access to higher education when she declined to even hear the case of Indiana University students who had been affected by it. More on these issues here.
It’s easy to imagine how much worse things would be right now, though, had we had three justices hand-picked by Hillary Clinton. Despite not only casting my vote for Donald Trump in 2020, but also choosing to work for the Nevada Republican Party in hopes of carrying my former state for him, I don’t agree with the majority of my party that nominating him a third time is the best path forward for Republicans. But should he run (and inevitably get the nomination if he does), I can’t help but look at aging justices like Breyer and Thomas and think of what fresh hell could befall us if Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke, or (God forbid) Hillary Clinton were to pick their successors. I'm certain I’d find myself thinking that Trump looks pretty good right about now, and I think most Americans would agree.