The whole “Biden is missing / Trump is hiding” thing is nonsense. Biden is practicing social distancing in accordance with both state and federal guidelines. Trump and/or the Secret Service was reacting to a perceived danger. If the pandemic and the protests had come four years earlier, and if Obama went to bunker while Trump was broadcasting from his basement, we’d see the exact opposite pattern of complaints. And whenever the pattern of complaints depends entirely on which team uniform someone wears, you know it’s a bullshit issue.
@Yellowdog “Trump has not selected any ‘conservatives’ Conservative is not a side.”
Conservativism is a political philosophy that comes with a set of principles, and the principles espoused by the judges Trump has appointed are conservative ones. Ergo, they are conservative judges. As much as we should appreciate Chief Justice John Roberts’ statement that there are no Trump judges or Obama judges—other than to the extent that some judges were appointed by Trump and some were appointed by Obama—we should also recognize that this doesn’t mean the judges are all blank slates with neither pasts nor principles to inform the decisions they make.
“These are constitutionalists, who interpret the law the way it was written and intended to be interpreted.”
First things first, “constitutionalism” is a view about the source of a government’s legitimacy and the limits of its authority. It is not a theory of judicial interpretation. Perhaps you are thinking about originalism or textualism? But all of the originalists on the court are also textualists, and textualism explicitly rejects the idea that judges should consider a statute’s original intent (since intentionalism requires judges to consider intent regardless of what the text says, whereas textualism requires judges to consider what the text says regardless of the intent of those who wrote it).
And of course, all judges think they are interpreting the law the way it was written. They just have different approaches to what that means. Nor is it clear that there is such a thing as the way that the law was “intended to be interpreted.” Leaving aside the fact that the US Constitution was written by a group of people who were deeply divided over a variety of complicated issues and had differing—sometimes even contrary—intentions when deciding what to put in it, the simple fact is that you can find arguments for both strict and loose constructionism in the writings of any individual Founder (most notably Thomas Jefferson, who is explicitly cited by scholars on both sides as the inspiration for their view). It’s rather difficult to stick to the original intent when the Founders—both as a group and as individuals—lacked a single, cohesive intention.
And that’s why nearly every school of judicial interpretation that has any serious sway with either judges or scholars rejects intentionalism. Case in point: Scalia and Ginsburg have both railed against intentionalism at various times.