Mat Staver, the lawyer with Liberty Counsel who once represented anti-gay Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis, is bragging that conservatives may be able to overturn marriage equality in just a matter of months.
Speaking with host Jim Schneider on Christian radio network VCY America, Staver was talking about the importance of conservative Christians voting in the 2018 midterm elections in order to ensure that the Senate remains under Republican control, according to audio obtained by Right Wing Watch.
If social conservatives vote in the 2018 elections — in which Democrats are expected to pick up seats — they will be able to ensure that Republicans retain the Senate. In turn, he said, that will ensure that President Donald Trump is able to name a conservative justice in the mold of Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court in case Justice Anthony Kennedy or one of the court’s liberal justices retires while Trump is still in office.
“[Trump] is appointing, nominating, so far, judges who are what I would call constitutionalists, originalists, dedicated to the original understanding and interpretation of the Constitution and statutes,” Staver said, adding that the president has been “hitting [it] on the nail” in terms of his judicial appointments, from lower courts all the way up to the Supreme Court.
But if Democrats win control of the Senate, he warned, Trump will be forced to nominate a justice that is palatable to Democrats, making it more likely that such a nominee would be a “judicial activist.”
“We are one midterm election away from eventually overturning the Roe v. Wade decision. And that’s because there will be at least one, maybe two more vacancies at the U.S. Supreme Court that Donald Trump will be able to fill in his first term,” Staver said. “But in order to do that, he needs a Senate that will ultimately confirm.”
Staver went on to say that “literally we are a few months away” from being able to appoint a conservative justice to a vacancy on the court and overturning decisions that social conservatives find objectionable.
If Trump is able to replace a liberal or moderate justice “with someone like Gorsuch,” he said, “that means the abortion decision, the same-sex marriage decision, all of those things that went the wrong way will ultimately be in the balance to be reversed.”
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