On Monday, Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nomination, Judge Neil Gorsuch, headed to the Senate floor for his first confirmation hearing. With the Senate Judiciary Committee voting on Gorsuch’s confirmation on April 3rd and the outcome not far away, here’s an overview of the potential justice:
Background:
Neil Gorsuch is currently a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and has considerable experience. He attended Columbia University, Harvard Law School and Oxford, and clerked for two Supreme Court justices and on an appeals court. While at Harvard Law School, Gorsuch was a classmate of Barack Obama and Obama’s former ethics czar, Norm Eisen.
Gorsuch spent 10 years working for a law firm in Washington D.C. until he became a high-ranking official for the Bush Justice Department. After his short-lived time working in the Justice Department, George W. Bush nominated Gorsuch for his current position as a judge on a court of appeals. During the process of his nomination, the American Bar Association rated him “unanimously well qualified” for a spot on the federal appeals court.
Views:
Judge Gorsuch’s views resemble late Justice Scalia’s, who he is in the line to replace, which is a characteristic President Trump was looking for in his Supreme Court nomination. Trump said, during the second presidential debate, “I am looking to appoint judges very much in the mold of Scalia.”
Trump was quite successful with finding a replacement that will fit in the mold of Scalia, with the SCOTUSblog even calling the parallels between Gorsuch and Justice Scalia “eerie.” The main similarities between the two being their shared legal philosophy. Antonin Scalia and Neil Gorsuch are both originalists, meaning they both interpret the words of the Constitution as they were meant when originally written. Gorsuch states in a lecture to Case Western University School of Law that “Judges should… strive (if humanly and so imperfectly) to apply the law as it is, focusing backward, not forward, and looking to text, structure, and history to decide what a reasonable reader at the time of the events in question would have understood the law to be — not to decide cases based on their own moral convictions or the policy consequences they believe might serve society best.” This lecture strongly shows his originalist views.
“Judges should… strive (if humanly and so imperfectly) to apply the law as it is, focusing backward, not forward, and looking to text, structure, and history to decide what a reasonable reader at the time of the events in question would have understood the law to be — not to decide cases based on their own moral convictions or the policy consequences they believe might serve society best.”
Many liberals find the originalist philosophy to be threatening to modern-day issues, such as women’s and LGBT rights, as the Constitution’s original meaning did not include these issues. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said, “I firmly believe the American Constitution is a living document, intended to evolve as our country evolves,” and that she finds the originalist philosophy troubling.
One of Gorsuch’s most high-profile cases involves the famous Hobby Lobby case when Hobby Lobby did not want to have to pay for their employee’s contraceptives because of their Christian views. Gorsuch sided with Hobby Lobby and argued that the Obamacare mandate took away some religious freedom from the company.
Another view of Gorsuch’s that is well publicized is his view on euthanasia and assisted suicide. In 2006, he published a book titled The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia where he argued that human life is inherently valuable and assisted suicide is wrong. While Judge Gorsuch never explicitly states anything about abortion in his book, some have argued that based on this book, you could infer that he is pro-life. In his book, he writes, “All human beings are intrinsically valuable, and the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.”
From Neil Gorsuch’s records, his views on many social issues, such as immigration, LGBT rights, and gun control, are still unknown, but he is sure to be asked about his stances on these issues throughout his confirmation hearing. Until then, we’re left wondering about his stances on many important issues and the possible repurcussions if he becomes a Supreme Court justice.
