Gorsuch's early reviews: Just what right hoped for
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 more liberal 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, viewed by some as insufficiently conservative because of his two opinions upholding President Barack Obama’s health law.
During arguments, Gorsuch has asked repeatedly about the original understanding of parts of the Constitution and laws, and he has raised questions about some long-standing court precedents, including the civil rights landmark ruling on “one person, one vote.
Gorsuch occupies a seat once held by Justice Antonin Scalia which they thought Obama would get to fill. But Senate Republicans 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.
Gorsuch likes to remind audiences of his relative youth, suggesting a long tenure on the bench.
He talked at length 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.
