Trump poised for potentially pivotal role in shaping future of Supreme Court

The results of Tuesday's election -- whichever way they went -- brought the potential to shape the U.S. Supreme Court for decades to come.

Now that Donald Trump has been declared the president-elect, court watchers are assessing how his second term in office could alter the trajectory of the high court, perhaps even to a greater degree than was observed in his first four-year stint, as The Epoch Times explains.

Conservative optimism abounds

Trump already had a pivotal role in defining the court's trajectory by appointing and securing the successful confirmation of three justices during his initial time in the Oval Office.

Since then, the conservative shift seen in the court has yielded landmark decisions overturning longstanding precedent including the abortion ruling of Roe v. Wade and the administrative law doctrine referred to as Chevron deference.

Ruling such as these sparked no end of outrage on the left and sparked frenzied demands to expand the court in order to pack it with liberal justices, presumably selected by the Democrat president they assumed would succeed Joe Biden.

With Trump now posed to take the helm once more, he could become, as the Epoch Times states, “one of the most consequential presidents for the U.S. Supreme Court by solidifying a long-lasting originalist majority.”

Republican Senate poised for action

With Republicans winning not just the White House but also control of the Senate, judicial nominations and confirmations will have a much simpler path over the next two than they might otherwise have enjoyed.

What remains uncertain, however, is whether the two senior-most justices on the high court, namely, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have any imminent plans to retire, even though both are in their seventies.

If they should happen to step aside, and Trump has the opportunity to tap two more jurists to the court, he would be the first president since Dwight Eisenhower to place five justices on the bench at the Supreme Court.

The prospect already has conservative judicial activists such as Carrie Severino very excited, and she has noted that in order to find originalists suitable for the job, Trump would not need to “look any farther than the appellate judges” he picked during his initial term.

“If he picks from that short list he himself has created, then I think we're going to have an awesome continuation of the originalist approach to the Constitution,” said Severino.

Liberal panic sets in

Now that they know there is little hope of initiating the sort of court-packing schemes they thought were their salvation, liberals have been scrambling for ways to get at least a small foothold at the high court, going so far as to suggest that Justice Sonia Sotomayor step aside immediately so that Biden can name a replacement while there is still time for confirmation by a Democrat-controlled Senate.

However, it now appears that even that ill-advised gambit is destined to fail, as sources close to the situation indicated over the weekend that Sotomayor has no intention of retiring in the near future, thwarting a last-ditch effort to get ahead of what may be a Trump-led fortification of the originalist court he has already helped establish.