Court nominee faces tough questions from Dems

WASHINGTON — Judge Neil Gorsuch faced tough questions from Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein Wednesday about his role in approving harsh interrogation techniques during his time as a lawyer in the administration of President George W. Bush.

In Gorsuch’s third day at his Senate confirmation hearings, Feinstein asked Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, why, when he was a Bush administration Justice Department official in 2005, he had scribbled “yes” on a document beside a question about whether CIA torture of terrorism suspects had yielded valuable intelligence. He said he was merely acting as a lawyer.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., pushed Gorsuch to say whether a president has constitutional powers to lawfully override torture and wiretap statutes. Gorsuch said he would approach such a case using analysis set out when President Harry S. Truman tried to seize steel mills.

Leahy also pressed Gorsuch to say whether he would recuse himself from Supreme Court cases involving Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz, who was a former client and helped get him appointed to the appeals court. Gorsuch did not answer directly.

The nominee would not discuss whether Trump’s business dealings with foreign governments might run afoul of the Emoluments Clause, an obscure constitutional provision.

Gorsuch defended his originalist judicial philosophy, assuring skeptics that “no one is looking to return us to the horse-and-buggy days.”

Democrats have struggled to find an attack line that sticks against Gorsuch. But they appeared to sense a potential opening outside the hearing room: a Supreme Court decision on Wednesday that lawmakers sought to frame as a rebuke of the nominee.

Not long after he started his testimony on Wednesday, Gorsuch defended an opinion he had written that ruled against an autistic student whose parents had sought reimbursement for his education under a federal law, the Individuals with Disability Education Act.

Gorsuch said he had merely applied a standard set out in a Supreme Court decision as interpreted by an earlier decision of his court, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.

At about the same time Wednesday, the Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision saying the 10th Circuit had been wrong. All that was required from public school systems, the 10th Circuit had said, was a “more than de minimis” benefit.