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How Democrats missed a chance to reshape the Supreme Court for a generation

"Agreed. I read an article awhile back as to how Democrats missed some chances at SCOTUS Judges."

Piqued the curiosity enough to make one search. Only got this one.

By Dylan Matthews [e-mail] Updated Jan 22, 2017, 2:57pm EST

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If it weren't for 77,744 voters .. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/12/the-final-final-final-results-for-the-popular-vote-are-in.html .. in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, the Supreme Court would have had, for the first time in nearly 50 years, a majority of Democratic-appointed justices.

Ever since Abe Fortas’s resignation in 1969, the Court has either been split down the middle or, more often, made up primarily of Republican appointees. Some of those Republican appointees nonetheless turned out to be liberals, but even taking that into account, the Court hasn’t been majority liberal since 1971, when William Rehnquist and Lewis Powell joined.

That hasn’t stopped the Court from evolving in a progressive direction at times. In 1973, GOP appointee Harry Blackmun authored Roe v. Wade, drawing only two dissents; from 1996’s Romer v. Evans to 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges, Anthony Kennedy and the Court’s liberals steadily expanded the rights of LGBTQ Americans.

Table of contents [inside]

But for the most part, over the past half-century liberals have been playing defense as an organized and well-planned movement of conservatives .. http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8643.html .. has limited the scope of rights trumpeted by liberals, expanded the power of the state in criminal justice, and issued more business-friendly rulings on campaign finance and regulatory issues.

The Court ruled that states didn't have to give poor black and Latino school districts the same funding as rich white districts. It ruled that school resegregation achieved through white flight to wealthy suburbs was just fine. It ruled that despite declaring abortion a fundamental right, that didn’t mean Medicaid had to extend that right to poor women, and then it reversed course on treating abortion as a fundamental right at all. It struck down the death penalty but then brought it back four years later.

And in more recent years, it’s gutted the Voting Rights Act, struck down limits on campaign donations by corporations, strangled Medicaid expansion in the crib, and, for the first time in American history, declared an individual right to own guns.

All that could've changed — if Hillary Clinton had won.

[...]

A liberal Court could've ended long-term solitary confinement. It could have mandated better prison conditions in general, making it more costly to maintain mass incarceration. It could have conceivably ended the death penalty. It could have upheld tough state campaign finance rules and started to move away from Citizens United. It could have started to develop a robust right to vote and limited gerrymandering. It could have strengthened abortion rights, moving toward viewing abortion rights as a matter of equal protection for women.

But because Donald Trump won, this is all moot.

More, mostly expanding on the paragraph immediately above ..
https://www.vox.com/2016/8/22/12484000/supreme-court-liberal-clinton

See also:

Snapshot of Secret Funding of Amicus Briefs Tied to Leonard Leo–Federalist Society Leader, Promoter of Amy Barrett
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=158902281