Thought-provoking article re meaning of legal conservatism

The Danger of Trump’s Clash with the Conservative Legal Movement
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FOR NEARLY A DECADE, the conservative legal movement has endured a marriage of convenience with Donald J. Trump. The president has now unequivocally asked for a divorce.

The signs of trouble in this relationship were there from the beginning. The conservative legal movement owes its remarkable success to three things: principle, persuasion, and persistence. These are qualities Trump does not appreciate. His wins flow from other characteristics.

Over the years, they tried to make it work. 

Members of the conservative legal movement remained united, though, in the belief that law matters, that the law is knowable, and that the law serves as an important constraint on judges as well as on the other branches. These are the principles to which it held and the constancy with which it held them throughout changing circumstances gave them force and gave the movement coherence.

To be sure, some individuals were drawn to the cause with partisan or policy motivations. And it cannot be denied that the correlation of conservative theorywith some conservative policy ends (for example, restricting abortion, protecting gun rights, or banning affirmative action) supercharged the movement. But the claim of the critics on the left that the legal principles merely cloaked a pursuit of a particular agenda never held, either among the legal theorists who debated the fine points of originalism or even among the ranks of the lawyers who staffed Republican administrations and congressional offices.