Senator Lindsey Graham, in praising the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court by Trump, mentioned something about his fear of who Trump would pick for the seat left vacant by the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia. He said he didn’t know who Trump would pick – possibly a TV judge, or something.
You just couldn’t believe he’d go that far, however.
Then again, if Fox News personality, Judge Andrew Napolitano is to be believed, the president is absolutely considering it.
.. Friends warned Napolitano not to take the president too literally – or seriously. “He’ll take your call and invite you to the Oval Office, but he just wants you to say nice things about him on TV,” the source says he told Napolitano at the time. But that didn’t sink the ambitious judge’s hopes.
.. “I think 20 years from now, people will look at 9/11 the way we look at the assassination of JFK today,” he told radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in 2010. “It couldn’t possibly have been done the way the government told us.”
Gorsuch’s big fat lie
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.
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.”