With his wife Louise looking on, Judge Neil Gorsuch testifies during the second day of his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing on March 21, 2017.
Jonathan Ernst / Reuters
WASHINGTON — Judge Neil Gorsuch will be the 113th justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, confirmed on a largely party-line vote Friday a little before noon.
Gorsuch was confirmed on the 420th day since Justice Antonin Scalia died.
The nearly 14 months that have passed since presented countless unexpected — and some expected — developments, leading to Friday’s vote that will send a conservative appellate judge from Denver to Washington.
Gorsuch, who clerked for Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy in the early 1990s, later worked in the Justice Department under President George W. Bush before being nominated, in 2006, to a vacancy on the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit — a move that sent him back to Denver.
A graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School with a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University in England, Gorsuch will be the only justice on the court from outside the coasts — although most of his two decades from when he started undergrad until when he joined the Tenth Circuit was spent on the East Coast, in Washington, New York City, or Boston.
On the Tenth Circuit, Gorsuch developed a reputation as a conservative judge, a good colleague, and a strong writer. One of Gorsuch’s fellow Tenth Circuit judges, Judge Harris Hartz, told BuzzFeed News in March that Gorsuch is hard-working, polite, and “someone who’s willing to change his or her mind and capable of changing your mind.”
Among his most noted cases are his positions in favor of strong protection for religious liberty in both the Hobby Lobby and Little Sisters of the Poor cases involving the contraception mandate under the Affordable Care Act.
When Scalia died, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell almost immediately said the Senate would not consider any nominee put forth by Obama.
A month later, Obama nominated the widely respected chief judge of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, Merrick Garland — but McConnell, aided by Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, refused to move the nomination forward. Obama continued to press for Republicans to consider his nominee, but to no avail.
In May, Trump did the unexpected and announced a list of eleven judges who he would consider for to replace Scalia if he were to be elected. Gorsuch was not among the 11 names.
Then, in September, Trump added another 10 names to the list — including Sen. Mike Lee and, more importantly, Judge Neil Gorsuch.
While Hillary Clinton presented no list of her own, most expected her to win the election, meaning either that Garland would be confirmed in the lame-duck period in the Senate after the election or that Clinton would put forth Garland or another nominee once she took office.
Of course, that didn’t happen. Trump won the presidential election, stuck to his list, and, on Jan. 31, Trump nominated Gorsuch for the Supreme Court.
It was one of the rare moments when the president — who was in Florida at Mar-a-Lago as the Senate voted on Friday — was front in center in the nomination process.
After nearly 20 hours of questioning by the Senate Judiciary Committee in March, Gorsuch's nomination came to full Senate — where Democrats, still angry about the treatment of Garland, filibustered the nomination on Thursday. As promised, however, McConnell successfully moved to change the rules of the Senate to require only a simple majority vote to end debate on Supreme Court nominations.
All of which led to Friday's confirmation vote.
Gorsuch said that January night that the president had entrusted him with “a most solemn assignment" in nominating him for the high court.
“Standing here, in a house of history and acutely aware of my own imperfections, I pledge, if I am confirmed, I will do all my powers permit to be a faithful servant of the Constitution and laws of this great country,” he said.
Gorsuch will now have the opportunity to do that — and quickly. The current Supreme Court term remains in progress, with oral arguments yet to be heard in a handful of cases, including a case out of Missouri about whether excluding a church from participating in a specific type of governmental program can violate the Constitution’s Free Exercise Clause.
Source BuzzFeed - Politics http://ift.tt/2oJyAmL
0 comments:
Post a Comment