Senator, those are not my words and I would never had said them.
I didn’t say that. I asked you if you agreed with this statement.
And I’m telling you I don’t.
That’s Neil Gorsuch.
He was appointed by President Trump to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant after the death of Antonin Scalia.
Scalia died during President Obama’s term, but Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland
was stonewalled by Republicans until a Conservative got into office…
They have ripped us to shreds.
Ripped us absolutely to shreds.
Actually, I was only kidding, you can get the baby out of here.
Now it’s paying off.
Gorsuch will affect decades of policy in America.
The qualifications of Judge Gorsuch are beyond dispute.
He is the man of our country and a man who our country really needs.
Although he was born in Denver, Gorsuch spent his formative years in Washington.
In the early 80s, he attended Georgetown Prep school,
a private jesuit school near D.C.
He graduated from Georgetown Prep in 1985 and attended Columbia University,
where he was an active and controversial conservative on campus.
He founded “The Federalist Paper,”
a campus publication written to takedown annoying student activists asking for all those pesky rights.
A student two years above Gorsuch recalls the soon-to-be judge’s temperament,
And in March of 1987, 20 plus white Columbia students
beat a group of black students and security guards,
prompting tons of student protests regarding racism.
Standing on the other side of them was Neil Gorsuch.
Writing in the school paper,
Gorsuch essentially envisioned that the black students’ activism would lead to their collapse.
Before graduating in 1988,
Gorsuch capped off his time at Columbia with a senior quote in his school’s yearbook
from Henry Kissinger,
He went on to Harvard Law and graduated in 1991— the same year as this guy:
[OBAMA] But I’m not just going to be humiliated on national television.
[Swish]
Obama was chosen to lead the Harvard Law Review. Gorsuch was not.
After graduating, Gorsuch clerked on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
before clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy.
He later worked for a white shoe law firm where he developed an appetite for litigation.
In his spare time, Gorsuch enjoys anything from fly fishing in the western streams to hitting the slopes —
which is where he was when he heard the news of Justice Scalia’s passing.
Gorsuch was “taking a breather” halfway through one of many ski runs when he found out.
In a speech, Gorsuch said he was “not embarrassed to admit” that he cried his way down the mountain.
But just one year later, he’d get back up and reach the peak.
Neil Gorsuch is an originalist,
meaning he interprets the Constitution as he believes it was understood at the time it was written,
when guns fired 3 rounds a minute,
the population was 1/10th of what it is today,
and people still owned other people.
I pledge that if I’m confirmed I will do all my powers permit
to be a faithful servant of the constitution laws of this great country.
Before Trump tapped him for a seat in the Supreme Court,
Gorsuch was on the Court of Appeals for the tenth circuit—
appointed by George W. Bush in 2006.
During his tenure, Gorsuch sided in a case with Hobby Lobby,
an arts and crafts chain owned by evangelical Christians
who objected to Obamacare’s mandate that health plans cover birth control.
Gorsuch’s opinion in Hobby Lobby said that companies, like people,
can have religious rights.
The Supreme Court upheld the narrow ruling.
Gorsuch also played a role in the infamous “Frozen Trucker” case.
On a -14 degree day, Trucker Alphonse Maddin abandoned his broken-down truck
after sitting in the freezing cold for hours.
The truck was eventually fixed and Maddin made the deliveries.
But he was fired anyway.
[MADDIN] I expected that help would arrive within an hour.
I woke 3 hours later to discover I couldn’t feel my feet,
my skin was burning and cracking,
my speech was slurred,
and I was having trouble breathing.
Maddin sued the company for wrongfully firing him.
Of the 7 judges who took on the case, 6 of them ruled in the driver’s favor.
One ruled for the employer:
[MADDIN] That judge was Neil Gorsuch.
Gorsuch has a long history of siding with corporations over employees
and he was questioned about how that would affect his rulings when in office during his confirmation:
[WHITEHOUSE] I can’t help but notice the long array of 5-4 decisions with all the Republican appointees
lining up to change the law to the benefit of distinct interests.
Republicans at the polls and big business pretty much everywhere.
However, Gorsuch claims that:
There’s no such thing as a Republican judge or a Democratic judge, we just have judges.
But Gorsuch’s interpretation of what ‘judges’ do seems to be
‘fight for giant corporations and against progress,’
and it’s showing as Supreme Court Justice:
In a case about ensuring same-sex couples the right to list both parents on birth certificates, Gorsuch disented.
When the court refused to review a challenge to California’s strict concealed carry laws,
which are right now granted to those who provide “good cause”
and a “particularized need, substantiated by documentary evidence,
to carry a firearm for self-defense.”
Gorsuch dissented from the court’s refusal.
Gorsuch has followed the Trump agenda quite possibly more than any other Trump appointee.
If his first 15 cases on the court are any indication,
he will continue to attempt to pull the court right on every single case that comes his way.
The most important decision a President of the United States can make is the appointment of a Supreme Court Justice.
Depending on their age, a Justice can be active for 50 years and his or her decisions can last a century or more,
and can often be permanent.