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Trump and Gorsuch pledge to follow in footsteps of arch right-wing jurist Antonin Scalia.
Fulfilling the Republican Party’s desire to keep the U.S. Supreme Court in extreme rightwing hands and his presidential campaign promise to gut reproductive freedoms, Donald Trump has nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch from the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver to the court.
The nomination sets the stage for one of the biggest domestic political fights in years, after Senate Republicans spent nearly a year willfully ignoring their constitutional responsibility to consider ex-President Obama’s nominee to the court, Merrick Garland.
Trump’s pick, who is known for his anti-abortion positions and fealty to so-called originalist constitutional doctrine, meaning he does not think anything beyond the founders' intentions should become part of federal judicial decisions, comes amid unprecedented political and popular resistance to his presidency. In recent days, there have been escalating protests over Trump's anti-Muslim executive orders, his firing of the acting attorney general late Monday after she said his decrees were unconstitutional and violated the Justice Department’s historic civil rights mission, and after Democratic senators refused to attend confirmation hearings Tuesday for two Trump caninet nominees who they said had lied to them.
As Trump announced his nominee in a nationally televised speech at 8 PM EST, some of the nation’s leading civil rights groups were preparing to hold a nighttime rally and demonstration on the Supreme Court’s steps to react to and reject Trump’s selection. Those groups included People for the American Way, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Alliance for Justice Action Campaign, NARAL Pro-Choice American, the Center for American Progress Action Fund and others.
Gorsuch, 49, is known for siding with religious liberty advocates in cases challenging Obamacare’s birth control mandates. He’s also written books rejecting right-to-die prerogatives for people living with terminal disease. While he has not explicitly issued an abortion ruling, his anti-choice views are fairly well established.
Michael Keegan, president of People for the American Way, was quick to criticize Gorsuch as extreme right-winger.
"Over the course of his career, he’s turned his back on fundamental American rights, from shutting down claims of gender discrimination in the workplace, to trying to limit Americans’ ability to join class-action lawsuits to challenge corporate wrong-doing, to ruling in the original Hobby Lobby [Obamacare] decision that corporations are people and can refuse to offer their employees birth control, to claiming that a police officer could not be sued for using excessive force when his stun gun killed a young man running from police simply because he was growing marijuana plants," he said. "That’s appalling.”
“We do know that Trump has repeatedly promised to overturn Roe v. Wade and use his appointments to the Supreme Court to advance his dangerous agenda,” said NARAL’s James Owens before the announcement. “If we take him at his word—and the last week has proven that we should—we know that Trump is preparing to appoint a justice who he believes will threaten Roe v. Wade and strip women of their right to bodily autonomy.”
Like NARAL, virtually every issue and concern that is the public interest is threatened by the Supreme Court nomination. After Justice Antonin Scalia died in early 2016, the court was left with a four-four conservative-liberal split on most contentious social and economic issues. The GOP, led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, refused to even hold hearings for Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, a federal appeals court chief judge who sailed through nomination hearings for that post several years before. Supreme Court justices typically serve for a quarter century or more, meaning that the court’s ideological center was poised to move to the left. However, Republicans essentially stole Obama’s final appointment, hoping that a Republican president would be elected in 2016 and keep the court as a right-wing majority.
Day of Growing Rage On Hill
Trump’s announcement comes as against a backdrop of mounting opposition by Democrats in Congress and large swaths of the public in both blue and red states. Even before Trump fired Acting Attorney General Sally Yates late on Monday, Senate Democrats had flocked to airports and attended rallies to protest Trump’s decree the U.S. would take no more war refugees from Syria and would block travelers coming from seven Muslim counties for 90 days while reassessing its immigration protocols. (He also issued orders to ramp up the domestic deportation machinery and to penalize “sanctuary” cities that would not cooperate with immigration police.)
On Monday night, on the steps of there U.S. Supreme Court, Senate Minority Leader Chick Schemer, D-NY, Sen. Ben Cardin, D-MD, Sen. Cory Booker, D-NJ, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-VT, Sen. Al Franken, D-MN, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-CN, all held forth against the immigration executive order banning travelers from Muslim countries, including, initially, holders of “green cards,” which are legal residents.
What was notable in their statements was the stridency and determination to resist Trump’s right-wing policies. “We now must be determined to fight for the long haul,” said Booker. “We stand with our fellow human beings who flee terrorism,” said Warren. “We will band together to fight Donald Trump as he tries to put himself above the law of the United States.” Sanders said, “We do not hate the Muslim people and we want them to know that. So we say to President Trump, ‘Rescind that ban.’”
Those protests were a prelude to Tuesday’s boycott by Democrats of the Senate Finance Committee’s proceedings to vote on Steve Mnuchin’s nomination as Treasury Secretary and Rep. Tom Price’s nomination to be Health and Human Services Secretary, denying the GOP a quorum needed to vote on the nominations and bring them before the full Senate—their next stage. The Democrats cited Mnuchin's and Price's false statements to the committee, with Mnuchin denying the mortgage lending giant he oversaw didn’t abuse borrowers and Price denying that he used insider information to buy stocks in healthcare companies under his congressional jurisdiction.
Before the Finance hearing, committee Democrats met in the office of the panel’s ranking member, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-OR, and agreed that they would all boycott the session. Widen, explaining on Twitter, said, “Today @SenateFinance Democrats refused to move forward with nominations of Mnuchin & Price… The litany of ethics revelations regarding @RepTomPrice are strong evidence that he cannot be allowed to have control of #Medicare… Mr. Mnuchin continued to fail to come clean on shady foreclosure practices that hurt Americans.”
The Democrats’ absence forced the GOP to postpone voting on those two nominees. At the same time in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing room, Democrats railed against Trump’s firing of Yates and said that his pick for attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-AL, had helped design the Muslim travel ban that Yates said was unconstitutional and refused to implement.
“Yesterday, early in the evening, we saw what a truly independent attorney general does,” said the panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-CA. “That is what an attorney general must be willing and able to do. I have no confidence that Sen. Sessions will do that. Instead, he has been the fiercest, most dedicated and most loyal promoter in Congress of the Trump agenda, and has played a critical role in the clearinghouse for policy and philosophy too undergird the implementation of that agenda.”
“The president’s decision to fire acting attorney general Sally Yates is shameful,” Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-VT said. “His accusation that she betrayed the Department of Justice is dangerous. The attorney general is the people’s attorney, not the president’s attorney.”
The Democrats managed to postpone the Judiciary Committee’s vote on Sessions on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, ran into new opposition when Democrats discovered that some of her answers on a questionnaire were plagiarized, according to the Washington Post.
Elsewhere, however, Senate committees confirmed Elaine Chao—Mitch McConnell’s wife—to beTrump’s transportation secretary, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry to be energy secretary, and Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-MT, to be interior secretary with bipartisan majorities, sending them to the full Senate for final up-or-down votes.
As Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-UT, told a half-empty hearing room, the Democrats do not have the votes to stop any of Trump’s cabinet appointments. That is because the GOP only needs a simply majority to confirm them.
“I’m really disappointed that my friends on the other side, Democrats on the other side, are deliberately boycotting,” he said. “Why that’s an important thing for them, I’ll never understand, because these two nominees are going to go through regardless.”
“I think this is a completely unprecedented level of obstruction… We did not inflict this kind of obstructionism on President Obama,” said Sen. Patrick J. Toomey, R-PA. “This is not what the American people expect of the United States Senate.”
Those statements are as disingenuous as they are absurd, especially in light of the Senate GOP’s obstruction and theft of Obama’s final Supreme Court nomination. Under the Senate’s current rules—which the Republicans may yet jettison—Trump’s nominee needs 60 votes to be confirmed. This is Trump’s only appointment where Senate Democrats have the power to block the president and the stakes could not be more consequential.
That’s why a spectrum of pro-democracy activists were gathering on the Supreme Court steps Tuesday night and preparing to rally and demonstrate to oppose Trump’s choice.
“Preserving Americans’ rights and basic constitutional values depends on having justices with the strength and willingness to stand up against serious abuses of power – even if it means rising above usual ideological alliances to reject bad behavior and legal arguments by the White House occupant who named them,” wrote Dorothy Samuels and Alicia Bannon, a senior fellow and senior counsel, respectively, at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.
History has shown that the Supreme Court serves its constitutional purpose when it stands apart from the politically powerful and wealthy to help Americans live with greater dignity, freedom and access to justice. Trump's selection of Gorsuch, a right-winger who has sided with religious zealots, goes against that grain.
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