WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch, a fast-rising conservative judge with a writer’s flair, to the Supreme Court on Tuesday, setting up a fierce fight with Democrats over a jurist who could shape America’s legal landscape for decades to come.
At 49, Gorsuch is the youngest Supreme Court nominee in a quarter-century. He’s known on the Denver-based 10th Circuit Court of Appeals for clear, colloquial writing, advocacy for court review of government regulations, defense of religious freedom and skepticism toward law enforcement.
“Judge Gorsuch has outstanding legal skills, a brilliant mind, tremendous discipline and has earned bipartisan support,” Trump declared, announcing the nomination in his first televised prime-time address from the White House.
Gorsuch’s nomination was cheered by conservatives wary of Trump’s own fluid ideology. If confirmed by the Senate, he will fill the seat left vacant by the death last year of Antonin Scalia, long the right’s most powerful voice on the high court.
With Scalia’s wife, Maureen, sitting in the audience, Trump took care to praise the late justice. Gorsuch followed, calling Scalia a “lion of the law.”
Gorsuch thanked Trump for entrusting him with “a most solemn assignment.” And he said, “Standing here in a house of history, I’m acutely aware of my own imperfections and pledge that if I am confirmed, I will do all my powers permit to be a faithful servant of the Constitution of laws of this great country.”
Some Democrats, still smarting over Trump’s unexpected victory in the presidential election, have vowed to mount a vigorous challenge to nearly any nominee to what they view as the court’s “stolen seat.” President Barack Obama nominated U.S. Circuit Court Judge Merrick Garland for the vacancy after Scalia’s death, but Senate Republicans refused to consider the pick, saying the seat should be filled only after the November election.
Trump’s choice of Gorsuch marks perhaps the most significant decision of his young presidency, one with ramifications that could last long after he leaves office. After an uneven start to his presidency, including the chaotic rollout last week of a controversial refugee and immigration ban, Trump’s selection of Gorsuch appeared to proceed with little drama.
For some Republicans, the prospect of filling one or more Supreme Court seats over the next four years has helped ease their concerns about Trump’s experience and temperament. Three justices are in their late 70s and early 80s, and a retirement would offer Trump the opportunity to cement conservative dominance of the court for many years.
If confirmed, Gorsuch will restore the court to the conservative tilt it held with Scalia on the bench. But he is not expected to call into question high-profile rulings on abortion, gay marriage and other issues in which the court has been divided 5-4 in recent years.
Gorsuch has won praise from conservatives for his defense of religious freedom. In two cases that involved the contraception mandate under the Obama health care law, he sided with businesses and nonprofit groups that voiced religious objections to the requirement that they provide cost-free birth control to women covered under their health plans.
The judge also has written opinions that question 30 years of Supreme Court rulings that allow federal agencies to interpret laws and regulations. Gorsuch has said that federal bureaucrats have been allowed to accumulate too much power at the expense of Congress and the courts.
Like Scalia, Gorsuch identifies himself as a judge who tries to decide cases by interpreting the Constitution and laws as they were understood when written. He also has raised questions about criminal laws in a way that resembles Scalia’s approach to criminal law.
University of Michigan law professor Richard Primus said Gorsuch “may be the closest thing the new generation of conservative judges has to Antonin Scalia.”
Gorsuch, like the other eight justices on the court, has an Ivy League law degree. The Colorado native earned his bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in three years, then a law degree from Harvard. He clerked for Supreme Court Justices Byron White, a fellow Coloradan, and Anthony Kennedy before earning a philosophy degree at Oxford University and working for a prominent Washington, D.C., law firm.
He served for two years in George W. Bush’s Department of Justice before the president nominated him to the appeals court. His mother was Anne Gorsuch, who was head of the Environmental Protection Agency in the Reagan administration.
Gorsuch is expected to face intense scrutiny from Democrats. Some liberals have demanded that Democrats block any Trump choice, underscoring the deep partisan discord surging through Washington.
“Now is not the time for business as usual,” MoveOn.org’s Ilya Sheyman said in a statement.
Gorsuch was among the 21 possible choices for the court Trump released during the campaign. Other finalists also came from that list, including Thomas Hardiman, who serves alongside Trump’s sister on the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and William Pryor, a federal appeals court judge and Alabama’s attorney general from 1997 to 2004.
If Democrats decide to filibuster Gorsuch’s nomination, his fate could rest in the hands of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Trump has encouraged McConnell to change the rules of the Senate and make it impossible to filibuster a Supreme Court nominee — a change known in the Senate as the “nuclear option.”
A conservative group already has announced plans to begin airing $2 million worth of ads in support of the nominee in Indiana, Missouri, Montana and North Dakota, four states that Trump won and in which Democrats will be defending their Senate seats in 2018.
Gorsuch Has Conservative Pedigree
By NICHOLAS RICCARDI, Associated Press
Neil Gorsuch, named Tuesday as President Donald Trump’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, has a solidly conservative pedigree that has earned him comparison to the combative justice he would replace, Antonin Scalia.
Gorsuch clerked for two Republican Supreme Court justices and worked in President George W. Bush’s Justice Department before being appointed to the federal bench and authoring a series of sharply written, conservative opinions. His mother, Ann, ran President Ronald Reagan’s Environmental Protection Agency.
But Gorsuch has also won praise among liberals and others in the Colorado legal community for his fair-mindedness and defense of the underdog.
“He is a very, very smart man. His leanings are very conservative, but he’s qualified to be on the Supreme Court,” said Denver plaintiff’s attorney David Lane. “I don’t know that Judge Gorsuch has a political agenda and he is sincere and honest and believes what he writes.”
“He’s smart, he’s independent — thank the Lord,” said Marci Glenn, a Denver attorney and a Democrat who recalled two cases before the judge on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. “As a lawyer for a little guy, knowing he was a conservative judge, I still felt comfortable having him on the panel.”
Gorsuch is a Colorado native who earned his bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in three years, then earned a law degree from Harvard. He clerked for Supreme Court Justices Byron White, a fellow Coloradan, and Anthony Kennedy before earning a philosophy degree at Oxford University and working for a prominent Washington, D.C., law firm.
He served for two years in Bush’s Justice Department before Bush appointed him to a seat on the 10th Circuit in 2006.
Gorsuch has contended that courts give too much deference to government agencies’ interpretations of statutes, a deference that stems from a Supreme Court ruling in a 1984 case. He sided with two groups that successfully challenged the Obama administration’s requirements that employers provide health insurance that includes contraception.
Gorsuch summed up his minimalist judicial philosophy and focus on impartial judgment Tuesday evening.
“A judge who reaches every outcome he wishes is likely a very bad judge,” he said after Trump introduced him from the East Room of the White House in a primetime televised address.
Lane, who frequently clashes with law enforcement, praised Gorsuch as fair and open-minded. Lane won a $1.8 million jury verdict against the Denver Police Department in a brutality and wrongful arrest case. The city appealed and the case ended up before Gorsuch. Lane said Gorsuch tore into the city’s lawyers and urged them to go to mediation rather than drag out appeals for years to deny the plaintiffs their reward. The mediation led the case to be settled for $1.6 million.
Gorsuch has also drawn attention for siding with religious employers against the Obama administration’s requirement that they provide health insurance that covers contraception. He also wrote a book arguing against euthanasia.
Rebecca Love Kourlis, a former Colorado Supreme Court justice, said Gorsuch has written 175 majority opinions and 65 concurrences or dissents in his decade on the 10th Circuit.
“He’s really earned his stripes,” she said.
Kourlis said Gorsuch is also a notable advocate for simplifying the justice system to make it more accessible. “Legal services in this country are so expensive that the United States ranks near the bottom of developed nations when it comes to access to counsel in civil cases,” Gorsuch wrote in a journal article last year. “The real question is what to do about it.”
The article is written in Gorsuch’s characteristic, straightforward style.
“He thinks it’s really important for people other than lawyers to understand what he’s writing,” Kourlis said.
Gorsuch is also an avid skier, fly fisherman and horseback rider, Kourlis said. He teaches at the University of Colorado’s law school in Boulder.
“He is humble, he is extremely articulate and he is extraordinarily hard-working,” Kourlis said.
In his financial disclosure report for 2015, he reported assets ranging from $3.1 million to $7.25 million. He earned $26,000 for his law school duties and another $5,300 in book royalties that year.