An election with consequences
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Some pundit somewhere has almost certainly proclaimed that the 2016 presidential election will be “the most important election in our lifetime.”
The reason we feel so confident on this is that every presidential election since 2000 has been certified as “the most important election in our lifetime” by at least one member of the chattering classes. We have yet to hear someone say, “This election will be, well, pretty routine when all is said and done. We’ll have a winner, we’ll have a loser, the Republic will still stand, and in a couple of years we’ll do it all again.”
That being said, the landmark rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court last week on the Affordable Care Act and gay marriage underscore something that will be deeply consequential in the next presidential election – the composition of the court.
In the unlikely event that one or two of justices retire or die in the 18 months remaining in Barack Obama’s presidency, the next president could end up appointing four jurists to the nation’s highest court, the most since Richard Nixon. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 82 years old, and has had bouts with ill health; Antonin Scalia is 79, and Anthony Kennedy soon will be; and Stephen Breyer will turn 77 later this summer.
Of course, any of these justices could end up like John Paul Stevens, the Gerald Ford appointee who served on the Supreme Court until age 90 in 2010. He was hale, hearty and lucid until his last day on the bench, and remains so today. But one, two or all of the aforementioned justices will likely leave the court in the next four to eight years. The court could maintain its 5-4 split between conservatives and liberals, the conservatives could deepen their hold on the court if a Republican is elected president next year, or it could turn out to be one of the more liberal courts since the days when it counted the likes of Harry Blackmun and Thurgood Marshall among its ranks.
That’s something for anyone to keep in mind if they believe it makes no real difference who wins the presidency in 2016.