A COURT CLONE OF SCALIA
Trump’s pick Supremely conservative
Judge Neil Gorsuch, the jurist President Trump nominated Tuesday night for the Supreme Court, comes from a well-connected family of Colorado Republicans and has a judicial philosophy that mirrors that of the man he will replace if confirmed by the Senate.
Justin Marceau, a professor at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law, said Gorsuch is “a predictably socially conservative judge who tends to favor state power over federal power.”
Marceau told The Denver Post the Ivy League-educated outdoorsman and avid skier would have a different style than the late Antonin Scalia, but shared his “originalist” view of the Constitution.
“It means that we would see a judge who, while perhaps not as combative in personal style as Justice Scalia, is perhaps his intellectual equal, and almost certainly his equal on conservative jurisprudential approaches to criminal justice and social-justice issues that are bound to keep coming up in the country,” Marceau said.
The nominee’s mother, the late Anne Gorsuch Burford, was director of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Ronald Reagan for 22 months.
In 1983, she resigned under pressure after a scandal over the mismanagement of a $1.6 billion federal program to clean up hazardous waste.
Gorsuch attended Columbia, Harvard Law School — where he was a classmate of former President Barack Obama — and Oxford. He was a partner at the Washington law firm Kellogg Huber Hansen Todd Evans & Figel.
He also clerked for Supreme Court Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy. Gorsuch, 49, and his wife, Louise, are the parents of two teen daughters and live in Boulder.
He strongly opposes euthanasia and backs political term limits.
Because he’s young by Supreme Court standards, Gorsuch could serve for decades, which makes him especially attractive to conservatives.
During his time as a private attorney, Gorsuch would make dra- matic gestures in court, longtime friend Mark Hansen told the Denver Post. In one case, which he won for a gravel-pit owner who was cheated out of money, Gorsuch said, “This is what they did to my poor client” before turning out his pants pockets, the newspaper reported.
Gorsuch is best known nationally for his role in the Hobby Lobby case, in which the company opposed, on religious grounds, the ObamaCare mandate to pay for employees’ contraceptives.
He wrote that federal courts should give strong consideration to religious beliefs, and the Supreme Court later ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby.