Gorsuch's Triumphs

The Atheist said:
Am I missing something important, or is my assessment of Gorsuch as an excellent judge entirely correct?
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Depends on how you look at it.

Gorsuch's core beliefs are goofy IMO, but some of these cases indicate that he is at least trying to be consistent to his textualist/ originalist philosophy even when it leads to a result that would make conservatives mad. Scalia would do stuff like this, which is why a lot of people that didn't agree with his principles have some grudging respect for him.

However, in constitutional issues this philosophy means caring what a committee of white dudes who have been dead for 200 years would think, and that is where this textualist stuff really can go off the rails as speaking for the dead, especially the long dead, is ventriloquism.

Conservatives are more into pretextualism/ventriloquism than textualism, meaning that textualism is just a way for them to clothe their ideas as received wisdom. Alito is about as good of an example of this as there could be. Often there is little difference, but now and then a case comes down like this civil rights act case that makes it really, really clear what is up.
 
Suddenly said:
However, in constitutional issues this philosophy means caring what a committee of white dudes who have been dead for 200 years would think,...
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Seems to me a quite wide majority of Americans agree with that position - the Constitution is sacred.
 
The Atheist said:
Seems to me a quite wide majority of Americans agree with that position - the Constitution is sacred.
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I suspect the only things Trump knows about the Constitution is that he's head of the executive branch, is Commander in Chief, and can pardon people.

Can't say I was surprised by Gorsuch's opinion.

Interesting that Thomas wanted to review qualified immunity.
 
The Atheist said:
Seems to me a quite wide majority of Americans agree with that position - the Constitution is sacred.
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This is a large part of the problem seeing that almost none of them have any real understanding of the document. They waive it around as a talisman; like a flag with less nationalist overtones.

Calling a document that started with specific provisions protecting the slave trade as sacred is at best unsettling. Deifying the framers (as "founding fathers") is necrocracy, even ignoring most of them were objectively awful people. At least North Korea uses one guy who was alive 30 years ago. We have a committee dead for two centuries.

The constitution itself has a ton of provisions that are general and ambiguous. All forms of positive law are to some degree limited in this way. It is with rare exception impossible to draft a set of rules that address every possible application of those rules.

Especially as to constitutional law, the idea that all of these ambiguities can and should be decided in the way that the writers would have decided is daft. Both because it isn't all that knowable and that it is, ironically, unclear that the people who wrote the thing meant it to be applied that way in the first place.

Heck, Thomas Jefferson was against the idea that the Supreme Court should even address whether a law is constitutional. He argued it should be solely a political question left to the legislature and voters. Appealing to him as to whether a law is in violation of the first amendment (he was big on separation of church and state) misses that he was very clear that the courts should just STFU about that in the first place.
 
:confused: Then what did Jefferson thinks the courts where supposed to do? Pure ground level guilt and innocence for civil and criminal cases, no legal interpretation responsibilities?
 
Suddenly said:
This is a large part of the problem seeing that almost none of them have any real understanding of the document. They waive it around as a talisman; like a flag with less nationalist overtones.

Calling a document that started with specific provisions protecting the slave trade as sacred is at best unsettling. Deifying the framers (as "founding fathers") is necrocracy, even ignoring most of them were objectively awful people.
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I'm going to take issue only with the highlighted word.
 
JoeMorgue said:
:confused: Then what did Jefferson thinks the courts where supposed to do? Pure ground level guilt and innocence for civil and criminal cases, no legal interpretation responsibilities?
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It would just remove the constitution from the equation. His point would be that the legislative process would decide whether a law was constitutional and that was that. There are still a lot of legal issues left. Arguments over federal statutes, legal disputes between states, and so on.

This latest case would be fine with Jefferson. It applies a federal law to a set of facts. They didn't touch whether the law was in conflict with the constitution.
 
Suddenly said:
It would just remove the constitution from the equation. His point would be that the legislative process would decide whether a law was constitutional and that was that. There are still a lot of legal issues left. Arguments over federal statutes, legal disputes between states, and so on.

This latest case would be fine with Jefferson. It applies a federal law to a set of facts. They didn't touch whether the law was in conflict with the constitution.
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That strikes me as rather simplistic for Jefferson. Dude was smart enough to know that no law can be written with such perfection and precision as to never need intepretation.
 
Belz... said:
I'm going to take issue only with the highlighted word.
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Fair enough.

More precisely I'd say that they were people that did a lot of awful things which we've both buried and ignored for the sake of developing a national myth. They are hard to defend once that context and the BS that accompanies it is stripped away. Which is more what I mean by "objectively," and not in the sense that the moral nature of a person can be purely objective.
 
I think the fact that the Founding Fathers built into the core structure of their government methods for change because they knew they weren't the end all, be all decision makers of how America should be run in perpetuity is more than enough to square the circle of any questions of their place in our discourse.
 
JoeMorgue said:
That strikes me as rather simplistic for Jefferson. Dude was smart enough to know that no law can be written with such perfection and precision as to never need intepretation.
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Sure. He understood the need for a judiciary for precisely that point.

He just was against the idea that the judiciary was the right body to decide questions of constitutional interpretation unless those provisions directly applied to them.

To him, the legislative process was the proper venue for that discussion. Not the courts.

"The Constitution . . . meant that its coordinate branches should be checks on each other. But the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch."

—Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, 1804. ME 11:51
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https://www.landmarkcases.org/marbury-v-madison/thomas-jeffersons-reaction
 
To anyone thinking the recent ruling on Gay/Trans rights is somehow evidence that maybe Gorsuch might actually not be so bad...

Think again:

From: CNN
The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked the Trump administration's attempt to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an Obama-era program that protects hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought to the US as children from deportation. The 5-4 ruling was written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.

Notice who didn't join in the ruling? Gorsuch and Drunky McRapeface.
 
(Previously discussed in one of the basic Trump Threads.)

Another case where Gorsuch sides with the other Conservatives:

From: CNBC
The Supreme Court on Monday voted 5-4 to strike down a restrictive Louisiana abortion measure in a major win for reproductive rights activists, with Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the court’s four liberals.... The case involved a Louisiana abortion law requiring doctors who provide abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of their clinic....Roberts said his vote with the liberals on Monday was based on the top court’s precedent in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, a case the court decided in 2016.

You know who didn't join the law in supporting abortion rights (despite the fact that a very similar law was struck down recently)? Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

So, Gorsuch gets praise for supporting LGBTQ rights, then within a few weeks votes against both abortion rights, and immigrant's rights.

Still think that Gorsuch "isn't that bad"?
 
Segnosaur said:
Another case where Gorsuch sides with the other Conservatives:
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Yeah, I was reading the dissent this morning.

What it does is show what a thin line there is between yes and no.

It also emphasises that Clarence Thomas needs to drop dead shortly after the end of the year and get another liberal justice appointed in his place. I can understand Gorsuch going the way he did, but Thomas just looks like the world's worst Uncle Tom.
 
Nice to see the Trump appointees and alleged puppets voting against his attempt to keep his tax returns from other courts.
 
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