With a shrewdly calculated innocence, Judge Neil Gorsuch told a big fat lie at his confirmation hearing on Tuesday. Because it was a lie everyone expected, nobody called it that.
“There’s no such thing as a Republican judge or a Democratic judge,” Gorsuch said.
.. We now have an ideological judiciary. To pretend otherwise is naive and also recklessly irresponsible because it tries to wish away the real stakes in confirmation battles.
.. party polarization now affects the behavior of judges, “reducing the likelihood that they will stray from the ideological positions that brought them to the Court in the first place.
.. If partisanship and ideology were not central to Supreme Court nominations, Gorsuch would be looking at more years in his beloved Colorado.
.. conservatives who regularly denounce “liberal judicial activism” now count on control of the Supreme Court to get results they could never achieve through the democratically elected branches of government.
.. They could not gut the Voting Rights Act in Congress. So Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s court did it for them. They could never have undone a century’s worth of legislation limiting big money’s influence on politics. So the Citizens United decision did it for them.
.. Gorsuch has done what economic conservatives count on the judges they push onto the courts to do: He regularly sides with corporations over workers and consumers. We can’t know exactly where the millions of dollars of dark money fueling pro-Gorsuch ad campaigns come from, but we have a right to guess.
.. it appears that the prior relatively pro-business conservative trajectory of the Supreme Court will now be restored.”
.. The nominee himself flicked away White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus’s declaration to the Conservative Political Action Conference that Gorsuch “represents the type of judge that has the vision of Donald Trump and it fulfills the promise that he made to all of you.”
.. conservatives, including Trump, want the court to sweep aside decades of jurisprudence that gave Congress broad authority to legislate civil rights and social reform, along with environmental, worker and consumer protections. Gorsuch good-naturedly evaded nearly every substantive question he was asked because he could not acknowledge that this is why he was there.
The Garland Precedent Should Not Stop Gorsuch
As a result, the Gorsuch nomination will largely be a proxy fight over the legitimacy of the Senate’s rejection of the Garland nomination.
The Left Distorts Originalism to Attack Judge Gorsuch
In other words, when the equal-protection clause was enacted, what were the words understood to mean? Were they understood to sweep away, say, restrictions on women in combat? Were they understood to mean that legislatures couldn’t enact laws that prohibit certain sexual practices? Drafters create a text, and that text has an original, understood meaning. That, in a nutshell is what “originalism” means.
.. The lesson from the legal Left — a lesson I was very clearly taught by multiple professors in law school — is that when a case is of sufficiently critical social importance, standard rules of legal interpretation give way to the greater demands of social justice. Here’s how one judge put it to me in his chambers: “You should always know the law, and you should always know what’s right. Do what’s right.” This would be an appealing notion if judges possessed godlike powers of judgment, but they don’t; they’re flawed like every other human. So it’s an appalling abuse of power.
.. To smear Neil Gorsuch, the Left has created and attacked a straw man.
Good-golly Gorsuch may turn out to be a rascal on the bench
Gorsuch played a folksy sycophant straight out of the 1950s.
No fewer than eight times he punctuated his testimony with “Leave It to Beaver” exclamations of “goodness” — “goodness, no!” “oh, my goodness!”
.. It’s a good bet that Gorsuch, once he has charmed the grown-ups and secured confirmation, will, like Haskell, reveal himself to be a rascal and cause all manner of mischief on the court with abortion and gun rights, money in politics and presidential power.
.. Leahy noted that Feinstein told him not to let Gorsuch’s flattery “go to your head, Pat.”
“Oh, he should!” Gorsuch insisted.
And when Leahy asked Gorsuch to “trust me” on a historical point, Gorsuch gushed: “I trust you, entirely.”
.. The most Democrats can hope for from Gorsuch is that he’ll stand up to Trump when he exceeds his constitutional powers.
.. Was he sincere in saying that he was a lowly “speechwriter” or “scribe” and not the brains behind a controversial memo he authored?
Was he sincere when he said “we were all surprised” to find his name on Trump’s shortlist?
.. People ordinarily don’t talk like this: “I have a loving wife, a beautiful home and children, a great job with wonderful colleagues. I’m a happy person.”