Justice Gorsuch fulfi lling dreams of conservatives

WASHINGTON — More than 2,000 conservatives in tuxedos and gowns recently filled Union Station’s main hall for a steak dinner and the chance to cheer the man who saved the Supreme Court from liberal control.

Justice Neil Gorsuch didn’t disappoint them, just as he hasn’t in his first seven months on the Supreme Court.

“Tonight I can report that a person can be both a publicly committed originalist and textualist and be confirmed to the Supreme Court,” Gorsuch said to sustained applause from members of the Federalist Society, using terms by which conservatives often seek to distinguish themselves from moreliberal judges.

The 50-year-old justice has been almost exactly what conservatives hoped for and liberals dreaded when he joined the court in April. He has consistently, even aggressively, lined up with the court’s most conservative justices. He has even split with Chief Justice John Roberts, who is viewed by some on the right as insufficiently conservative because of his two opinions upholding President Barack Obama’s health-care law.

During arguments, Gorsuch has asked repeatedly about the original understanding of parts of the Constitution and laws, and he has raised questions about long-standing court precedents, including the landmark civil-rights ruling on “one person, one vote.

Gorsuch talked at length at the Federalist Society event about the importance of seeking out the meaning of the Constitution and laws as they were understood when they written.

“Originalism has regained its place at the table of constitutional interpretation, and textualism in the reading of statutes has triumphed. And neither one is going anywhere on my watch,” Gorsuch said.

Liberals’ despair about Gorsuch goes beyond his judicial actions. He occupies a seat once held by Justice Antonin Scalia that they thought Obama would get to fill. But Senate Republicans Gorsuch refused to consider Obama’s nominee, a strategy that paid off when Donald Trump unexpectedly won the White House.

At the Federalist Society, Gorsuch recognized the improbable turn of events that led him from an appellate judgeship in his native Colorado to America’s highest court.

If someone had told Gorsuch a year ago what would soon transpire, “I would have said that you had taken way too much advantage of my home state’s generous drug laws,” he said.

Early reviews of Gorsuch’s time on the court have varied with the ideological bent of his reviewers.

While his confirmation was pending, the liberal Alliance for Justice worried that Gorsuch would often embrace the most conservative outcome on the high court. “Our concerns were confirmed,” said Nan Aron, the group’s president.

Daniel Epps, a Washington University law professor in St. Louis and former law clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy, said he finds Gorsuch’s style sometimes grating, but less so the substance of his questions at arguments.