Speaking on a Religious Right radio program last week, Mat Staver, the founder of the conservative legal group Liberty Counsel, urged conservative Christians to go to the polls in the 2018 midterm elections in order to ensure that President Trump is able to nominate Supreme Court justices who will vote to overturn decisions on abortion rights and marriage equality because “literally we are a few months away” from ensuring that those rulings are overturned.
Praising the confirmation of Kyle Duncan to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Staver told VCY America’s Jim Schneider that Trump “literally has the opportunity to reshape the landscape of the entire federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court.”
“The nice thing about what President Trump has done, different from other Republican presidents, is that he is appointing, he’s nominating, so far, judges who are what I would call constitutionalists, originalists, dedicated to the original understanding and interpretation of the Constitution and the statutes,” he said. “On the other hand, Republican presidents in the past, they’ve been hit or miss. President Trump so far has been hitting this on the nail.”
Staver added that social conservatives are “one midterm election away from eventually overturning the Roe v. Wade decision” because “there will be at least one, maybe two more” Supreme Court vacancies during Trump’s first term in office.
But in order for that to happen, he said, Republicans must maintain control of the Senate or Trump will be forced to nominate “somebody who’s palatable to the judicial activist crowd in the Senate.”
If Trump is able to replace any liberal or moderate justice “with someone like Gorsuch,” he said, “that means the abortion decision, the same-sex marriage decision, all of those things that went the wrong way will ultimately be in the balance to be reversed. So literally we are a few months away.”
