The president has very little influence on those courts - by design, that's how the Constitution works.temporal1 wrote:During 2017, with new presidential leadership, court rulings appear to be moderating-away from strict atheist-humanist reasoning.
I think you can find plenty of cases that run each way. For the most part, court rulings are based on American law and the American Constitution, and they cannot be based on biblical reasoning. One of the challenges of the courts is to respect the rights of Christians, atheists, humanists, Muslims, etc. all at the same time. The Masterpiece Cakeshop case is a really good example of this - now that the judges have decided that gay marriage is protected, how do you also protect the rights of Christians who have religious beliefs against gay marriage? Or if you go back to much earlier times, how do you protect the rights of Christians who object to fighting in the military or going to public schools when these beliefs are very much out of the mainstream?
The president of the United States really does not lead the courts. He can nominate judges, that's a longer term proposition. And you don't always know how that will work out until much later. For instance, it was the Supreme Court that legalized gay marriage in the United States, not the president, and the majority opinion was written by Anthony Kennedy. Ronald Reagan appointed Kennedy to the Supreme Court, saying this:
I think Reagan would have been surprised by Kennedy's opinion in this case, but probably pleased by his opinion in many other cases. We won't really know how Gorsuch develops as a Supreme Court justice for years.Ronald Reagan wrote:Judge Kennedy is what many in recent weeks have referred to as a true conservative—one who believes that our constitutional system is one of enumerated powers—that it is we, the people who have granted certain rights to the Government, not the other way around. And that unless the Constitution grants a power to the Federal Government, or restricts a State's exercise of that power, it remains with the States or the people.