The reason many people held their noses and voted for Donald Trump boiled down to the Supreme Court. The idea was that Hillary Clinton would nominate horrible justices to the court who would roll back constitutional liberties while Trump would pick conservatives would follow the law and the Constitution. Trump has promised to choose conservatives, even going so far as to release a list of names from which he would select justices.
Trump kept his promise by nominating Judge Neil Gorsuch, a 49-year-old member of the 10th Court of Appeals. Gorsuch attended Columbia, Harvard Law, and Oxford.
His opinions suggest someone who respects deeply the Bill of Rights, having ruled for Hobby Lobby and the Sisters of the Poor in first amendment cases concerning Obamacare mandates. He also proved to be well spoken when he thanked the president for his nomination at the White House. In effect, he proved to be an heir to the late Antonin Scalia.
Naturally, the left hates Gorsuch as if he were the devil incarnate. He would consign women to back-alley abortions, gay people to the closet, African Americans to the plantation, and old people to the grave. Democratic politicians condemned Gorsuch with their prewritten soundbites. Protestors took to the streets with their preprinted signs and rehearsed slogans.
The TV ads are already being bought to paint the judge as “out of the mainstream.”
For all the drama surrounding the nomination of Gorsuch, one detects a faulty strategy on the part of the Democrats. If they mount an all-out offensive, with threats of a filibuster and delaying tactics. For one thing, many of the senators who are proclaiming Gorsuch to be unacceptable approved him without comment for the appeals court.
For another thing, his confirmation would only restore the Supreme Court to the ideological balance it enjoyed before the untimely dead of Justice Scalia. Why not reserve the maximum effort for when one the liberal justices leaves the court? Then the stakes will be higher, since Trump’s likely nominee would shift the balance of the court rightward, with the potential of rewriting decades of American jurisprudence.
In any case, sit back and enjoy the show. The battle over Gorsuch will be entertaining but, barring the unexpected, will have nut one outcome, the confirmation of a new Supreme Court justice.
