#Trump’s smashing court success and other commentary

With Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation, President Trump is now clearly “the most important president in the modern era when it comes to shaping the judiciary,” cheers The Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen. Trump has justified every conservative who voted for him for the sake of the courts. He has named three sound justices, where a President Hillary Clinton would have pushed the Supreme Court the opposite way. Democrats’ high-court picks always lean left, but so have many named by Republicans: “So Democrats have a perfect record on recent Supreme Court appointments, while Republicans were not even batting .500 — until Trump came along.” In short, he “has produced a court that will protect our freedoms for decades to come.”

From the right: The Nation’s Survival Is at Risk

“The year 2020 has brought enormous challenges, and the question now is whether our reformist spirit is up to the task,” warns Matt Purple at Spectator USA. “Yet there is hope.” Considering our past — our wars, riots, labor unrest, assassinations, crime — “2020 looks less like a violent departure than a return to form.” America’s problems aren’t “unprecedented in her history,” nor unique among nations today. Her “would-be challengers are relatively weak”; the only two exceptions are Russia and China, but “neither poses the threat of, say, a Soviet Union.” Yes, that still leaves the question of whether we can remain strong “internally.” Fact is, “the United States could very well fall.” But “that doesn’t mean it has to.” Ultimately, he concludes, it’s “up to us.”

Freelancer: Hey, Lawmakers — Leave Us Alone

A California law forcing companies to hire more people as employees, with benefits, rather than as independent contractors, instead led to “thousands” of contractors who simply “lost work,” fumes freelancer Kim Kavin at Reason. Yet Joe Biden is vowing to pass a federal version of that law. ­Research shows most contractors “prefer contract work to traditional jobs,” but “anti-contractor crusaders” simply treat them as “invisible.” In fact, the pandemic has made Kavin “more grateful than ever” to be a freelancer: She is her “own boss,” no one can force her into an unsafe situation and she has “multiple streams of income” — and, yes, health insurance. At a recent hearing on a similar law proposed for New Jersey, contractors — many of them truckers — filled the room. Like her, Kavin says, they just wanted lawmakers “to leave them alone.”

Taibbi: The ‘Russian Disinformation’ Hoax

Some major news outlets have dismissed The Post’s Hunter Biden story as “foreign propaganda” without any evidence, laments Matt Taibbi in his newsletter, citing some of the “creative methods” used to promote Russian-conspiracy theories. Some, such as Rep. Adam Schiff and a number of former intel officials, pretend to have inside information. Others cling to flimsy reports that “authorities are investigating if it might be Russian disinformation.” Journalists have been “blasted as accomplices to foreign disinformation plots” for asking valid questions about the story, even though the Biden campaign “can’t say for sure if it’s disinformation at all.” A foreign element to the story is still possible, admits Taibbi, but the lack of concrete evidence has “forced the press to levitate” claims through “propaganda spin cycles.”

2020 watch: The Prez Is Not America’s Dad

At National Review, Cameron Hilditch takes on a particularly pernicious case for voting for President Trump: the idea that “a great leader functions as a father to the nation.” In reality, “few sentiments could possibly be more fascistic or less American than this one,” which “implies a whole host of analogous rights and responsibilities.” For one: “Fathers traditionally make the rules of the household . . . Presidents do not — they enforce laws that others pass.” And: “Fathers treat their children as obedient dependents, which is a diametrically opposite role to the one that Americans have taken up ever since they spilled Papa George’s tea all over Boston Harbor. Our forefathers brought this country into being precisely by behaving like disobedient independents, who do not generally make good children.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board