The following comes from a January 8 Denver Catholic article by George Weigel:

Here are two suggestions for what Catholics in America might ponder before November 8.

(1) The most important numbers to keep in mind between now and Election Day are “78,” “80,” and “83.” Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer will be 78 by November 8; Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy will be 80 by then, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be 83. If the actuarial tables mean anything, those numbers suggest that the next President of the United States is likely to get two, perhaps three, and just possibly four nominations to the Court.

This demographic reality creates an opportunity, unprecedented since the disaster of Roe v. Wade, to make significant advances in rebuilding the structure of legal protection for human life from conception until natural death in the United States. It also creates the possibility of reversing more than a half-century’s jurisprudential malpractice in the matter of Church-and-state and reaffirming the truth about the First Amendment, which is that “no establishment” serves the goal of “free exercise.” And it just might mean getting the question of what “marriage” is, and who may “marry” whom, reconsidered as a matter of constitutional law, not public policy preference.

(2) When the new president gets his or her first intelligence briefing in the Oval Office on January 21, 2017, he or she may wonder what demon possessed him or her to want the job. For the world is almost certainly going to be more dangerous that day than at any point since the height of the Cold War, and perhaps as long ago as 1947. The dismantling of the international security architecture that has guided the North Atlantic democracies since 1949 has proceeded apace for the past seven years; those responsible for that dismantling stubbornly refuse to consider the evidence before their eyes and hold steady to a lemming-like march toward disaster; the new president will thus face a challenge unlike any since Harry Truman confronted the consequences of the collapse of British power after World War II.