Justice Gorsuch Delivers

“One of my proudest moments was when I looked at Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill this Supreme Court vacancy,’ ” Mr. McConnell told a political gathering in Kentucky last summer.

With this audacious pledge — made only hours after news of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death on Feb. 13, 2016, reached the public — Mr. McConnell demolished longstanding Senate tradition and denied a vote to one of the most well-qualified nominees ever

.. Justice Gorsuch, who was confirmed less than three months ago, has already staked his claim as one of the most conservative members of the court.

.. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., a staunch conservative in his own right, often seeks out points of compromise among the justices. On June 26, the court’s last opinion day, Justice Gorsuch appeared to be having none of it.

.. The conservative majority will grow even stronger if more justices retire during Mr. Trump’s term, a very good possibility. At that point, the president and Senate Republicans — who destroyed the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees in order to confirm Justice Gorsuch — will be able to put anyone they like on the court.
.. Mr. Trump will be out of power by 2025 at the latest. But thanks to Mr. McConnell, Justice Gorsuch, and whoever else might join him in the next couple of years, will entrench a solid conservative majority on the court for far longer.

Behind Neil Gorsuch’s Non-Answers

“It’s not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing. It’s a matter of it being the law, and my job is to apply and enforce the law.” Gorsuch portrayed himself as a kind of judicial automaton, obligated to pay mindless obeisance to the Court’s prior rulings. This interpretation of the role of Supreme Court Justices is, to put it charitably, incorrect—they can and do overturn their earlier holdings. And Trump didn’t nominate Gorsuch simply because he knows how to follow precedent. He nominated Gorsuch because his career resembles a lab experiment synthesizing every trend in modern conservative thought.

..  From his boyhood days as a Republican Senate page to his decades of volunteer work for G.O.P. candidates, Gorsuch has been a strong party loyalist. (Like many Republican pols, he refers to the “Democrat,” rather than the Democratic, Party.)
.. His background also includes a dose of pro-corporate, deregulatory libertarianism, as reflected in his close relationship with the billionaire Philip Anschutz, a client turned mentor
.. A sampling of authoritarianism can be seen in Gorsuch’s service in George W. Bush’s Justice Department, where he helped craft a proposal for the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo. (The Supreme Court later ruled it unconstitutional.)
.. He said that he had participated in some twenty-seven hundred cases on the appeals court, and had voted with the majority in ninety-nine per cent of them. This proves only that most cases are routine. (Even the Supreme Court issues unanimous rulings more than half the time.)
.. Gorsuch would embrace the deregulation of campaign finance symbolized by the Citizens United decision. (He argued in an opinion that judges should evaluate limits on political contributions using the same tough standards that they apply to racial discrimination.)
.. When Scalia died, more than eleven months remained in Barack Obama’s Presidency, but Senate Republicans refused to give his nominee even a hearing. This departure from norms was all the more outrageous because the tactic was used to block a moderate
.. it’s their duty to speak for those who lack political power. The Trump era has already meant trouble for these people—the poor, the sick, dissenters, immigrants—and Gorsuch, for all his intellectual distinction, has shown scant regard for their concerns. There’s little reason to believe that he would as a Justice, either.

American Political Integrity Is in a State of Collapse

The woman who went on every major Sunday-morning news program after the Benghazi terrorist attacks and told flat-out falsehoods about its nature and motivations is now lecturing America about integrity.

.. A person who was one of the chief national-security officials when the Obama administration was spinning false narratives about the Iran nuclear deal

.. watching Demcrats spill crocodile tears over the Supreme Court, convinced that Neil Gorsuch was basically stealing Merrick Garland’s seat. Yet every sentient being in Washington knows that if the roles were reversed and, say, one of the liberal justices stepped down or passed away in the final months of a Republican presidency, the congressional Democrats would have behaved in the exact, same way

.. In fact, none other than Joe Biden made that same promise more than 20 years before.

.. The president and his team have repeatedly issued false denials about contacts with Russians, and the president himself keeps tweeting allegations and assertions that are most charitably described as incomplete, imprecise, and sometimes just outright wrong. Even when he’s “vindicated,” it’s often a strange kind of vindication, where his actual words were wrong, but something still happened. For example, wiretapping becomes “incidental collection.” Millions of illegal votes becomes millions of illegal registrations.

.. All of this nonsense is justified, excused, and indulged through the sheer force of tribalism. Unilateral honesty is seen as unilateral disarmament.

.. In one of John Adams’s most famous letters, he wrote that “our constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

.. “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.”

.. America needs political virtue. Where will she find it?