Justice Gorsuch spends first year standing alone
Newest justice ready to ‘jump into the deep end’
At the close of the Supreme Court’s 2016-17 term, Neil Gorsuch showed he would be willing to stand alone. He has stuck by his belief that judges should follow the wording of law.
WASHINGTON – Neil Gorsuch had been a member of the Supreme Court for exactly 11 weeks when he made clear in a single day what type of justice he would be.
The court struck down an Arkansas law that treated same-sex couples differently than opposite-sex couples on their children’s birth certificates. Gorsuch dissented.
The court refused to consider a challenge to the Department of Veterans Affairs’ system for evaluating disability claims. Gorsuch dissented.
The court declined to hear a challenge to a California law limiting who can carry a concealed gun in public. Gorsuch dissented.
And the court turned aside a challenge to the meager sum Mississippi paid when it converted a former landowner’s property into a park. Gorsuch said the justices should hear a similar case “at its next opportunity.”
Thus it was that on the last day of its 2016-17 term — as the court addressed gay rights, government power, gun ownership and government takings — Neil McGill Gorsuch announced to the legal world that he would not go along to get along.
“He came to the court more ready to jump into the deep end than a lot of recent nominees,” says Jonathan Adler, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
Gorsuch has been jumping in ever since.
“What you’re seeing is a justice who believes the court has a responsibility to decide cases,” says Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist Society and an outside adviser to President Trump on judicial nominations. “I don’t see in Justice Gorsuch the same kind of incrementalism that some of the other justices have.”
In the nine months since that declaration of independence, Gorsuch has receded from the headlines he commanded as Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee. But he has not retreated from his core beliefs that the court should favor the words contained in the Constitution and federal laws over the supposed expertise of the federal bureaucracy.
Nor has he disappeared from the public eye following some early, often unfavorable reviews: that he was im-