New justices usually take years to find their footing at the Supreme Court. For Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who joined the court in April, a couple of months seem to have sufficed.
His early opinions were remarkably self-assured. He tangled with his new colleagues, lectured them on the role of the institution he had just joined, and made broad jurisprudential pronouncements in minor cases.
.. When the case was argued in April, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who joined the court in 2006, said there was no clear answer to the question.
.. In dissent, he said the answer was plain, as some kinds of cases belong in one court and other kinds in another.
.. Justice Gorsuch’s only majority opinion of the term came in Henson v. Santander Consumer USA. It was about debt collection, and it was unanimous.
Here, too, Justice Gorsuch was ready to swing for the fences.
Trump and the Religious Right: A Match Made in Heaven
Here’s what everyone’s missing about the surprising bond between the president and the faithful.
Dismissed by the cultural elite. Disrespected by the mainstream media. Delegitimized by the American left. And desperate to stop the bleeding.
.. But it is equally the story of American evangelicalism, whose adherents feel marginalized in a culture that they believe no longer reflects its core values or tolerates its most polarizing principles.
.. why they felt a connection with him as a candidate, or why many feel an even stronger kinship with him as president today. One fascinating explanation, proffered repeatedly during conversations with evangelicals over the past year, is that they identify with Trump because both he and they have been systematically targeted in the public square—oftentimes by the same adversaries.
.. he was also expressing solidarity with an audience that can relate to feeling victimized.
.. “The most politically incorrect thing to do these days is talk about Christianity,” says Steve Scheffler, president of Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Iowa chapter and a prominent grass-roots player in Trump’s victory there last fall. “Religion has been under siege for a long time. And I don’t want to sound like an alarmist, but if Hillary Clinton had won, religious liberty in America would basically be finished because of her appointments to the courts.”
.. for Christians who feel they are engaged in a great struggle for the identity of America—and fear that their side has been losing ground—the most important question is not whether Trump believes in their cause, but whether he can win their wars.
.. “Jimmy Carter sat in the pew with us. But he never fought for us,” Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, told me after the president’s speech. “Donald Trump fights. And he fights for us.”
.. This casting of Trump as a great champion of the faithful, engaging the forces of secularism on behalf of a beleaguered religious right, is essential to understanding his appeal among evangelicals.
.. Critics point to religious people occupying the highest public offices and governing by their faith, often to the detriment of nonbelievers
.. wonder how this sense of martyrdom came to be so misplaced.
.. Christianity is under attack from the worldly influences of academia and entertainment and media
.. They see people and organizations of faith—florists, wedding cake bakers, Hobby Lobby, the Little Sisters of the Poor—persecuted for living their spiritual convictions. They shudder as pastors are subpoenaed for their sermons. And they fear, as same-sex marriage becomes culturally entrenched, a cascade of further defeats
.. Many Christians believe in the idea of “spiritual warfare,” the concept of God and Satan enlisting their armies of angels and demons to battle for the souls of people through everyday occurrences and experiences.
.. Many also believe in what might be described as divine irony—that is, the notion that God uses flawed, unlikely individuals to achieve his ends and advance his kingdom. (Jacob, Moses, David, et al.)
.. “George W. Bush was one of them, but he was a compassionate conservative. They want someone who’s a fighter
.. “It’s a lot of things: the policy battles, the way he ran his campaign, the way, frankly, that he’s handling the FBI investigation into Russia. Trump doesn’t back down. And that kind of leadership, evangelicals feel like they haven’t seen it from the White House.”
- nominating a conservative in Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court;
- reinstating and strengthening the Mexico City policy, which eliminates U.S. funding for international nongovernmental organizations that perform abortions;
- signing the Congressional Review Act to route federal money away from Planned Parenthood;
- and issuing an executive order that begins to broaden religious liberty guidelines
.. “I believe we’re winning this battle,” James Dobson, the lionized Christian author and radio host, said to thunderous applause Saturday night during the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s closing dinner.
.. By standing up and fighting on behalf of a community that has long felt the same way, Trump has earned its lasting loyalty
Donald Trump, Establishment Sellout
WHICH side are you on? Are you with Donald Trump, or with the Washington insiders who want to undo his election? Do you favor the legitimate president of the United States, or an unelected “deep state” — bureaucrats, judges, former F.B.I. directors, the media — that’s determined not to let him govern? Are you going to let a counterrevolution by elites bring down a man who was elevated to the White House precisely because the country knows that its elite is no longer fit to govern?
This is how the debate over Donald Trump’s mounting difficulties is being framed by some of my fellow conservatives, from Sean Hannity to more serious pundits and intellectuals.
.. But Trump is not actually governing as a populist or revolutionary, and the rolling crises of his first four months are not really about resistance to an “America First” or “drain the swamp” agenda
the various outsider groups that cast their lot with him
- working-class ex-Democrats to
- antiwar conservatives to
- free-trade skeptics to
- build-the-wall immigration hawks to
- religious conservatives fearful for their liberties —
have seen him pick very few difficult fights on their behalf.
.. his legislative agenda has been standard establishment-Republican fare — spending cuts to pay for upper-bracket tax cuts, rinse, repeat.
.. he’s mostly handed foreign policy over to his military advisers
.. Religious conservatives got Neil Gorsuch because he was a pedigreed insider. But they aren’t getting anything but symbolism on religious liberty, because Trump doesn’t want to pick a fight with the elite consensus on gay and transgender rights.
the establishment keeps winning:
- Planned Parenthood was funded in the budget deal and
- the border wall was not, the promised
- NAFTA rollback looks more likely to be a toothless renegotiation, Trump’s occasional talk about
- breaking up the big banks is clearly just talk,
- we haven’t torn up the Iran deal or
- ditched the Paris climate accords, and more.
.. populism needs a seat at the table of power in the West, and the people who voted for our president do deserve a tribune.
.. Trump is not that figure. As a populist he’s a paper tiger
.. too incompetent and self-absorbed to fight for them.
he’s not being dogged by leaks and accusations because
- he’s trying to turn the Republican Party into a “worker’s party” (he isn’t), or because
- he’s throwing the money-changers out of the republic’s temples (don’t make me laugh), or because
- he’s taking steps to reduce America’s role as policeman of the world (none are evident).
.. he’s at war with the institutions that surround him because he behaves consistently erratically and inappropriately and dangerously, and perhaps criminally as well.
.. there is no elite “counterrevolution” here for them to resist, because there is no Trump revolution in the first place.
The Government Gorsuch Wants to Undo
But the reality is that Judge Gorsuch embraces a judicial philosophy that would do nothing less than undermine the structure of modern government — including the rules that keep our water clean, regulate the financial markets and protect workers and consumers. In strongly opposing the administrative state, Judge Gorsuch is in the company of incendiary figures like the White House adviser Steve Bannon, who has called for its “deconstruction.”
.. a small group of conservative intellectuals have gone much further to argue that the rules that safeguard our welfare and the orderly functioning of the market have been fashioned in a way that’s not constitutionally legitimate. This once-fringe cause of the right asserts, as Judge Gorsuch put it in a speech last year, that the administrative state “poses a grave threat to our values of personal liberty.”
.. As the court has recognized over and over, before and since 1935, Congress is a cumbersome body that moves slowly in the best of times, while the economy is an incredibly dynamic system. For the sake of business as well as labor, the updating of regulations can’t wait for Congress to give highly specific and detailed directions.
.. The administrative state isn’t optional in our complex society. It’s indispensable.
.. The rule came to be known as Chevron deference: When Congress uses ambiguous language in a statute, courts must defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of what the words mean.
.. Justice Antonin Scalia reached the Supreme Court, he declared himself a Chevron fan. “In the long run Chevron will endure,” Justice Scalia wrote in a 1989 article, “because it more accurately reflects the reality of government, and thus more adequately serves its needs.”
.. Judge Gorsuch argued that Chevron — one of the most frequently cited cases in the legal canon — is illegitimate in part because it is out of step with (you guessed it) Schechter Poultry.
.. Judge Gorsuch is skeptical that Congress can use broadly written laws to delegate authority to agencies in the first place. That can mean only that at least portions of such statutes — the source of so many regulations that safeguard Americans’ welfare — must be sent back to Congress, to redo or not.
.. What would happen if agencies could not make rules for the financial industry and for consumer, environmental and workplace protection? Decades of experience in the United States and around the world teach that the administrative state is a necessary part of the modern market economy. With Judge Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, we will be one step closer to testing that premise.