Meanwhile, in the Senate. . .

eleven Federal judges were approved on December 17.

It is now the case that the Trump Administration has a record number of judicial appointments and its being clear that the Federal judiciary is being made over.  Predicting how these things work out is always extremely difficult, but the nation really hasn't experienced anything like this since the Carter Administration.

Indeed, the Carter Administration provides a lesson as the Administration was largely ineffective, except in this area.  The remaking of the judiciary under Carter has had some lasting effects all the way to the present date. That is now over.  Even if Bernie Sanders is elected President in the Fall, the Trump appointees will mean a conservative court for the next twenty years.  That in turn will be decried by the liberals, but as conservatives in this context are not jurisprudentially conservative, what that really  means is that a large number of issues that the Court has seized as its own over the past forty years will now return to legislatures.  That could be regarded as a triumph for democracy, but generally political liberals have been aware that since the early 1970s many of their positions have been deeply unpopular with the public and won't stand up in legislative debate.  So the irony has been that "left wing" jurists distrust the voting public while "ring wing" jurists don't worry about the voting public one way or another.

As has been noted, what the U.S. actually lacks are jurists who have a "conservative" judicial philosophy.  American conservative jurists have tended to be cut out of the Scalia mold in which they are conservative in that they seek to conserve the original text of the Constitution, rather than conservative in the sense that they bring an underlying conservative notion of what the law consists of. In earlier times there were jurists who did that, and there are still legal philosophers who do that.  However, on the bench, there are not.  The opposite is actually true on the left where "liberal" judges actually do have a "liberal" or "progressive" judicial philosophy.

The change here is really due to Mitch McConnell.  Love him,  like him, or hate him, McConnell appears to have been highly savvy to his time.  Judicial appointments were stalled by McConnell during the Obama Administration and massively accelerated during the Trump Administration.  A stable of well qualified conservatives appears to have been vetted by the Federalist Society and the appointments have been rapid.  Trump has cooperated in this, and this appears to be the one place where some sort of "deal" was in fact made. Based upon what's been occurring, it appears highly likely that McConnell always viewed Trump as a one term President and that the political conservatives one chance to really impact the judiciary.  Indeed, because Republican Presidents have been really unreliable in this area the Trump Administration may ironically have been the one real opportunity that McConnell would ever have, and he's seized it.  By doing this, the country will in fact be hugely impacted in ways that are only just beginning to occur.

Of course, the dream here would be for the Senate to have the opportunity to appoint one or two more justices to replace one or two more liberal justices with conservative ones.  Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who is 86 years old and in poor health is often regarded as the most likely to need to step down (or die) but she clearly has no intention of doing so if she can avoid it.  Should a Democrat be elected in November 2020, it would seem almost certain that she'd then resign.  But as Scalia's death has shown, there's no reason to believe that being a Supreme Court justice guarantees living a long life and so the balance is always in the air.

That balance, however, has been very much tilted rightward in the Federal judiciary as a whole, and therefore a change in the courts approach to many things will be inevitable.  One of those inevitable changes will be the return of major social issues to legislatures, something that they haven't had to deal with in full for decades.