And the party's biggest loss. Neil Gorsuch (and other court nominees) alone is so devastating to the party and the future of the left and liberalism that the 2018 election is small beans.
I don't know why everyone circle jerks over SCOTUS so much. Sure, if RBG, Kennedy and Breyer are replaced by Trump, the 2016 election will have been very damaging long-term, but Gorsuch replacing Scalia just maintains the status quo. And it's not like the Republican Justices besides Gorsuch are spring chickens either.
Let's put it this way... 2008-2016 (or, perhaps more to the point, 1986-2016) would have been an extremely different time period, politically, if Merrick Garland had been on the Supreme Court instead of Antonin Scalia. "Maintaining the status quo" is disastrously bad for the Democrats in that context.
Citizens United,
Shelby County,
Heller,
Morrison,
Casey,
Lopez,
Hobby Lobby,
NFIB and many more seminal cases that have turned the country in a more conservative direction would have gone the other way (ah, and
Bush v Gore, too).
