Trump Eases Beef Tariffs for 90 Days to Cut Consumer Prices

When Antonin Scalia died suddenly in February 2016 the Supreme Court stood on the brink of a 5-4 liberal majority for the first time in a generation. Senate Republicans refused to consider President Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland and then watched as Donald Trump’s unexpected victory handed them the chance to install Neil Gorsuch instead. The result is the conservative supermajority that now dominates the court and has already overturned long-settled precedents on abortion voting rights and regulatory power.

The blockade began the day Scalia’s death was announced. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared that no vacancy arising in a presidential election year should be filled until voters had their say. The argument ignored history: vacancies had been filled in election years as recently as 1988. Democrats warned that the move set a dangerous precedent. Republicans held firm and the seat remained empty for more than a year.

Trump’s win changed the arithmetic. He nominated Gorsuch a federal appeals judge with a record of skepticism toward federal agencies and expansive views of religious liberty. Democrats tried to block the nomination with a filibuster but Republicans changed Senate rules to allow confirmation by simple majority. Gorsuch joined the court in April 2017. Two years later Brett Kavanaugh replaced Anthony Kennedy and Amy Coney Barrett took the seat that Republicans had held open after Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death. The liberal majority that seemed possible in 2016 never materialized.

Gorsuch’s tenure has proved more complicated than his early critics predicted. He joined the majority in major conservative victories including the 2022 decision that eliminated the constitutional right to abortion. Yet he has occasionally broken with the court’s right wing on issues ranging from tribal sovereignty to criminal sentencing. Colleagues describe him as independent minded and sometimes unpredictable. That independence has not altered the court’s overall direction. The 6-3 conservative majority has limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate power plants curtailed the Voting Rights Act and expanded protections for gun owners and religious employers.

The long-term consequences extend beyond any single term. Lifetime appointments mean the current ideological balance could persist for decades. Cases now on the docket involving presidential immunity federal regulation of social media and challenges to diversity programs will test whether the court continues its recent pattern of narrowing federal power and expanding state authority. Legal scholars note that the path to this outcome began with the 2016 refusal to consider Garland a move that altered the court’s composition without a single vote by the full Senate.

Public confidence in the institution has fallen sharply since then. Polls show partisan gaps in approval ratings wider than at any point in modern history. Democrats have introduced legislation to expand the court and impose term limits though those proposals have little chance of passing a divided Congress. Republicans defend the current makeup as the legitimate result of elections and Senate rules. The underlying reality remains unchanged: a single vacancy and the decision to leave it unfilled shifted the balance of the nation’s highest court in ways that continue to shape American law and daily life.