Judge Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee for the US Supreme Court
President Donald Trump got a jump on Cupid this year, handing America a Valentine in the person of a federal judge with, as the Associated Press notes, “a writer’s flair and polished legal pedigree.” The President’s intention is to send him to the Supreme Court to succeed Justice Antonin Scalia, who died February 13, 2016.
Like Justice Scalia, Judge Neil Gorsuch is not only a writer with flair and an enviable legal background but a jurist for whom the terms “textualist” and “originalist” are no strangers. Having served on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals since 2006, Judge Gorsuch called his nomination “a most solemn assignment.”
“It is the rule of judges to apply, not alter, the work of the people’s representatives,” the judge said at President Trump’s announcement Tuesday. “A judge who likes every outcome he reaches is very likely a bad judge.”
All in all, quite a judicial Valentine, don’t you think?
Of course, given the sore-loser approach of Senate Democrats, this Valentine in 2017 could translate into a pre-Thanksgiving pink slip in 2018 for Sherrod Brown. The senior Ohio senator’s vote on the Gorsuch confirmation might be a nail in Brown’s political coffin, especially to voters who passed on the donkey for the elephant in 2016.
As soon as the Gorsuch pick was known, Brown announced his opposition. He declared the nominee to be “far outside of the judicial mainstream,” with rulings that deem corporations are people, are hostile toward anti-discrimination and criminal justice protections, and oppose women’s rights to basic healthcare at places like Planned Parenthood. “The people of Ohio deserve Supreme Court justices who will defend the rights of working families over Wall Street and corporate special interests – and Judge Gorsuch’s record doesn’t pass that test,” said a statement from Brown.
Memo to Senator Brown: It’s not too late to change your mind and vote in favor of the 49-year-old from Denver.
As Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said, “His academic record, his background are extraordinary,” Cruz said. “He was a law clerk to Byron White, who is John F. Kennedy’s only Supreme Court nomination – he was a Democrat himself, Byron White – and Judge Gorsuch’s record is such that he has demonstrated the intelligence, the humility, the faithfulness to law that I think Republicans are going to vote for, but I also hope and believe a number of Democrats will as well.”
More important, Senator Cruz vowed that Senate Democrats would not be able to derail Gorsuch’s nomination, telling Fox News that “one way or another, I believe the Senate will confirm Judge Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.”
To non-lawyers like me, Gorsuch is right in the mold of Antonin Scalia. The first Italian-American to sit on the Supreme Court, Antonin Gregory Scalia embraced an originalist, or textualist, approach to his decision-making.
“The Constitution,” Scalia declared, “is not an organism. It means today what it meant when it was adopted.” See https://clevelandbusinessreview.org/2016/02/14/a-man-of-words-a-man-of-law/ .
In time Justice Gorsuch will be a “lion of the law,” just as Gorsuch called Scalia.
Originally published on Cleveland Business Review.