More than 20 years ago, C-SPAN and its academic advisors decided to create a survey instrument, by which “historians, professors and other professional observers of the presidency” would be asked to rate all presidents in ten areas from best to worst. They conducted the first survey in 2000 and, using the same criteria, have repeated it since then every time administrations changed.
This year, 142 scholarly elites completed the survey that asked participants for evaluations in the following ten categories:
- Public Persuasion
- Crisis Leadership
- Economic Management
- Moral Authority
- International Relations
- Administrative Skills
- Relations with Congress
- Vision/Setting an Agenda
- Pursuit of Equal Justice for All
- Performance Within the Context of the Times
Abraham Lincoln has finished on top in every one of the surveys, including the fifth one just conducted following the change to the Biden administration.
It will come as no surprise to many that Donald Trump finished fourth from the bottom in this year’s survey, his first. He finished ahead of Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan, and behind all the others. Even Warren Harding got more respect from the raters.
However, the historians, et al, were not asked to rate Presidents in terms of how consequential they were. And it is here I suggest Trump would finish in the top ten, perhaps even the top five. I base this on one thing and one thing only: His fundamental change of the American Judiciary, principally at the Supreme Court level. Trump succeeded in locking in a deeply conservative bench for decades to come. That was the result of the grifter and reality show star’s Faustian Bargain with Mitch McConnell, senate Majority Leader during the Trump years. Trump craved power and being adored by people who were in need of someone to adore, and McConnell wanted his legacy to be the establishment of a profoundly conservative court. They each got what they bargained for.
Trump had two other monumental accomplishments, of course. The first was passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which was a Christmas present of the first order for the nation’s wealthy, a knife in the back for everyone else, and a means to a significant widening of the ever-growing divide between the haves and have nots. Trump’s second accomplishment was to give the Republican Party an opportunity to exercise noble leadership in the face of his insane narcissistic nationalism and autocratic desires culminating in the January 6th insurrection. Unfortunately, only two Republican leaders, Representatives Cheney and Kinzinger, answered the call. The rest of them, every one of them, became profiles in cowardice.
However, these other two Trumpian achievements can be changed. Congress can change tax laws, and Republicans can grow spines. But that Supreme Court thing? That is here to stay.
Which brings us to the imminent Supreme Court vacancy caused by the announced retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer.
When he was campaigning for President, Joe Biden promised if he had the opportunity to nominate a Supreme Court Justice, he would nominate a highly-qualified black woman. With Justice Breyer’s announcement, Biden has reaffirmed that pledge. He will submit his nomination to the Senate in the very near future. It will be a black woman.
How will Republican Senators react to the nominee, whoever she is? How will they approach the hearings to be held by the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Illinois senator Dick Durbin? Will they be able to restrain the natural gravitational urges of their more ambitious and inflammatory members to grandstand opportunistically? Will they be able to keep Trump out of it?
Nominations to the Supreme Court are highly political. History is replete with examples, and this one will be no different. But from here, deep in the winter of the Berkshire mountains, my guess is that with a few unavoidable histrionics from the grandstanding children, Biden’s nominee will sail through like a battleship through fog, with Republicans, trying to appear as honorable adults, saying they refuse to do to Biden’s nominee what the Democrats did to Bret Kavanaugh.
Not that it will make a bit of difference to the future rulings of the Supreme Court.
