Reject this extreme nominee

Democrats are rightfully angry at the shoddy treatment appeals Judge Merrick Garland received from Republican senators last year.

But that’s not why senators should oppose the confirmation of President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch. Gorsuch’s nomination deserves to be evaluated on its own merits — and not based on who occupied the seat before him. By those merits, Gorsuch has shown himself to be far too extreme for the Supreme Court.

That shouldn’t come as any surprise. Gorsuch was handpicked by two right-wing legal groups, the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, that have made no secret of their mission to radically reshape our nation’s courts. Gorsuch’s own record shows why they were so confident that this nominee would help advance their mission.

Over the past decade, Gorsuch has amassed a long and troubling record on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, routinely favoring the interests of corporations and the powerful over the rights of ordinary Americans. In Gorsuch’s hearings, senators focused on the so-called “frozen trucker” case — in which Gorsuch alone of seven judges who heard the case found that a trucker who took steps to save his own life wasn’t protected by federal law from being fired. But that case is only one in a long string of cases in which Gorsuch has twisted the law to produce outcomes that only a conservative ideologue could love.

At his hearings, Gorsuch did nothing to assuage those concerns. Instead, he avoided answering even the most rudimentary questions: Even Samuel Alito, perhaps the Court’s most consistently conservative member, was willing to agree that the case recognizing married couples’ right to birth control was rightly decided. Not so Gorsuch, who refused to say the same, despite the fact that most Americans consider the question to have been put to rest decades ago.

Gorsuch is not a mainstream conservative nominee. Nor is he, despite his best efforts to obfuscate his views, a stealth nominee. His own record makes clear he’s among the most extreme conceivable choices for our nation’s highest court. The Senate should reject his confirmation.