Slate - "Neil Gorsuch Was Hatched in a Federalist Society Lab"

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/03/neil_gorsuch_was_hatched_in_a_federalist_society_lab.html




With spare body parts stolen from Atticus Finch, Richie Cunningham, and Snoopy.

By Dahlia Lithwick



Neil Gorsuch is in a tough spot. He is striving to sound a note of neutrality and apolitical dignity at a proceeding in which he has been served up to perform in a political reality show. It’s not just that as his confirmation hearings grind on, Gorsuch becomes palpably more and more squeezed between the ugliness of Republican obstruction of Merrick Garland and the fragile tyranny of the man who named him. That would be enough of a lift for any nominee. But then Gorsuch is also required to serve up a three-day performance art piece to show he is floating above all of this—that the meat grinder of Senate polarization and the soaring Shakespearean nuttiness of the man who nominated him have nothing to do with who he is and how he got here.

To be fair, I keep finding myself wondering if Chief Judge Merrick Garland would have fared any better under these circumstances. Sure, he wouldn’t have been dragged down as far by the behavior of the president who nominated him, but he would have faced the same challenges of a politicized conversation about the role of judges and the same no-win subterfuge of refusing to answer substantive questions. In one sense, the uglier confirmation politics become, the hollower any judge’s claim to dispassionate neutrality must appear. Every judge is just cannon fodder for the big show. Every judge faces criticisms about hypocrisy and faux neutrality, and I imagine that had Clinton prevailed and Garland been on the hot seat this week, he would have also squirmed beneath unanswered questions and evasive generalities.

For at least some of us, Gorsuch’s performative big-hearted Westernness is beginning to chafe.
But it’s worse for Judge Gorsuch, because although he really has mostly lived a judicial life above the partisan fray, the toughest questions he is being asked to answer—about Trump’s contempt for judicial independence and the Republicans’ treatment of Judge Garland and the corruption and dark money that have surely helped procure his seat—are not really his fault or his responsibility. It will surprise you not at all to hear that “I am my own man” and “nobody speaks for me” have become among the most frequent and plaintive Gorsuch refrains at this week’s hearings. “No man is above the law” is another, because dislodging himself from the garbage all around him is Gorsuch’s only way through. But none of those sayings matter. Gorsuch is dancing with the lobbyists, the senators, and the president that brung him. And somehow that makes his efforts to dance on the ceiling all the more jarring.

Certainly, Gorsuch’s efforts to rise above the tsunami of crud and corruption that washed him up onto the Senate’s shores has been laudable. But at some point his protestations that he can’t talk about politics, doesn’t know what “dark money” is, and cannot vocally and specifically defend judges against attacks from the president (who just launched another salvo against judges) begin to look like a product of the machine that put him at the hearing in the first instance. Gosh and goodness on repeat don’t save that.

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[world wide wally]

1. At this point, for all we know, Gorsuch was hand picked by Putin