There are few things some Democrats and their allies in the media enjoy more than denigrating the conservative legal movement as a cabal of shadowy theocratic fascists intent on turning the country into one giant Handmaid’s Tale reenactment. It has become a pastime for people like Senator Sheldon “Dark Money” Whitehouse (D., R.I.) and Politico reporter Heidi Przybyla.
Przybyla got another chance to play this game when she reported that Leonard Leo helped “facilitate the sale of former White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway’s polling company in 2017 — as she was playing a key role in advocating for Leo’s handpicked list of Supreme Court candidates.” Okay. So what?
Przybyla is betting that if you squint hard enough, you’ll see the impropriety, but she can’t change the fact that this story is a nothing burger. Just because Leo was helping Conway does not impugn her motives or the quality of President Trump’s three Supreme Court picks: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. As National Review contributor Ed Whelan puts it in Pryzbyla’s story, Trump had already made a “clear and high-profile commitment” to the judge list before his presidency began, making it “bizarre to think that any possible lobbying by Kellyanne Conway” would have had an effect one way or another.
For all his flaws, Donald Trump did an excellent job selecting judicial nominees for every level of the federal court system. With the help of Leo and the Federalist Society, his administration put the judiciary on a restorative path back to its constitutionally ordained role of “saying what the law is, not what it should be.” Try as they might, the naysayers cannot tarnish this achievement.