The Agenda

Dear Reader,

In assessing the legacy of Donald Trump’s one-term presidency, the most indisputable item on the list is the federal judges with lifetime appointments that the Trump Administration and the Senate have put on the bench. There are more than two hundred Trump-appointed federal judges, including three members of the Supreme Court: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

It isn’t just that there are so many Trump judges; it’s also that they are more ideologically coherent than the judges appointed by past Republican administrations. All three of the new Justices, and a solid six-member majority of the Supreme Court, are members of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal organization founded nearly 40 years ago, partly to create a pipeline of future judges. The debates about the appointments of Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett focused heavily on a handful of specific issues, like abortion. That misses the breadth of what has happened on the Supreme Court. A comprehensive worldview has been put into a position of judicial power.

In The Agenda, Ian Millhiser, a lawyer and former law clerk in the federal appellate court system who is now a senior correspondent for Vox, offers by far the most comprehensive picture we have of what this Supreme Court is likely to do. Meticulously citing specific past decisions by the Justices, Millhiser offers persuasive evidence that major systemic changes are coming, in areas like voting rights, the independence of federal agencies from political interference, and the separation of church and state. He also demonstrates that the Court’s conservatives have left behind the traditional view that the judicial branch of government should do as little as possible, and adopted a far more maximal view of judicial power.

The Agenda is an indispensable guide to what are sure to be the defining political battles of the next few years, which may leave government in the United States profoundly altered in a conservative direction.

Sincerely,

Nicholas Lemann
Director, Columbia Global Reports