Judge Neil Gorsuch, the jurist President Trump nominated Tuesday night for the Supreme Court, comes from a well-connected family of Colorado Republicans and has a judicial philosophy that mirrors that of the man he will replace if confirmed by the Senate.
Justin Marceau, a professor at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law, said Gorsuch is “a predictably socially conservative judge who tends to favor state power over federal power.”
He told The Denver Post the Ivy League-educated outdoorsman and avid skier would have a different style than the late Antonin Scalia, but shared his “originalist” view of the Constitution.
“It means that we would see a judge who, while perhaps not as combative in personal style as Justice Scalia, is perhaps his intellectual equal, and almost certainly his equal on conservative jurisprudential approaches to criminal justice and social justice issues that are bound to keep coming up in the country,” Marceau said.
The nominee’s mother, the late Anne Gorsuch Burford, was director of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Ronald Reagan for 22 months.
In 1983, she resigned under pressure after a scandal over the mismanagement of a $1.6 billion federal program to clean up hazardous waste.
Gorsuch attended Columbia, Harvard Law School and Oxford, and he was a partner with the Washington law firm Kellogg Huber Hansen Todd Evans & Fige.
He also clerked for Supreme Court Justices Byron White and Anthony Bahis Siteleri Kennedy.
Gorsuch, 49, and his wife, Louise have two teenage daughters, Emma and Belinda, and live in Boulder.
He strongly opposes euthanasia and backs political term limits.
Because he’s so young — by Supreme Court standards — Gorsuch could serve for decades, which makes him especially attractive to conservatives.
“He’s brilliant, conservative and impossible to oppose. That’s a deadly combination for Democrats,” David Lat, managing editor of the legal Web site Above the Law, told The Denver Post.
The Senate unanimously voted to confirm Gorsuch to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2006.
But unlike then, he will likely face a fight from Senate Democrats furious over the GOP’s refusal to even hold a hearing or vote on Merrick Garland, former President Barack Obama’s nominee.
Gorsuch is best known nationally for his role in the Hobby Lobby case, in which the company opposed on religious grounds the ObamaCare mandate that it provide contraceptives to employees.
He wrote that federal courts should give strong consideration to religious beliefs, and the Supreme Court later ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby.
With Post Wire Services
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