High court justice lauds bipartisanship
The newest member of the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative bloc appeared before a San Francisco judicial conference Monday and sang the praises of bipartisanship.
“Democracy depends on our ability to learn from those who have very different convictions,” said Justice Neil Gorsuch, speaking on a civics education panel at the annual meeting of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
“Those with whom we disagree still have the best interests of the country at heart.”
Gorsuch, a former judge on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, was nominated by President Trump to succeed the late Justice Antonin Scalia, a vacancy that the new president was able to fill only because Senate Republican leaders had refused to hold hearings on President Barack Obama’s nomination of Appeals Court Judge Merrick Garland last year.
The Senate confirmed him in April after Republican leaders prevented a Democratic blockade by repealing the filibuster for Supreme Court appointments and allowing approval by majority vote.
Gorsuch has lived up to his conservative reputation so far on a court that often splits along ideological lines. He joined Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito in an opinion that signaled their willingness to uphold Trump’s travel ban, aimed at countries with overwhelmingly Muslim populations, and called for its enforcement while the court considers the case.
In another case, Gorsuch dissented from a ruling requiring Arkansas to list two lesbian spouses as parents on their child’s birth certificate.
On Monday, however, Gorsuch portrayed the courts as a forum where disputes are peacefully resolved.
“The rule of law in this country is amazing,” he said — 95 percent of federal cases are resolved in trial courts, a great majority of appeals court rulings are unanimous, and even at the Supreme Court, which reviews the most closely contested cases, more than 40 percent of the decisions have been unanimous for decades.
“We are able to achieve resolutions of our social disputes in a remarkable, peaceful way” in the courts, Gorsuch said.
Gorsuch was filling in for Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Supreme Court’s liaison with the Ninth Circuit, which oversees federal courts in California and eight other Western states. Kennedy canceled his annual appearance at the conference because his wife broke her hip in a fall in Austria, where Kennedy was teaching a summer law course.
Other panel participants stressed the need for civics education in a nation where barely one-fourth of the adult population can name the three branches of government (legislative, executive and judicial), according to a recent opinion poll.
Robert Katzmann, chief judge of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, said the media add to public misunderstanding by frequently identifying the president who appointed each judge in a divided case in news stories, “as if being a judge was a partisan activity.”
Gorsuch did not blame anyone for the information gap, but said bridging it was a task for courts and other institutions as well as schools. “Selfgovernment is not self-executing or self-perpetuating,” he said.