jostonjustice.blogspot.com 7/9/2017
Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch celebrated the Fourth of July by joining the holiday parade in the small Boulder County community of Niwot. Gorsuch "worked the parade like a senator, not a sitting Supreme Court justice," according to a reporter for the left-leaning news site Rewire.
As Colorado's second Supreme Court justice in history (after Byron R. White), Gorsuch was welcomed by most in the crowd as home boy made good, but dissent was heard. One spectator greeted Gorsuch by mocking his appointment to a seat that, by all historical practice, rightfully belonged to Merrick Garland. Martha McPherson's sign stated her opinion in all caps: "USURPER GORSUCH SUCH A SHAM."
Back in Washington, Gorsuch was also drawing attention as court watchers and advocates and experts across the ideological spectrum assessed the first three months of a high court career that could last 30 years. Advocates on the left and the right appeared to agree on one point: Gorsuch could be on the way to being more conservative than his lionized predecessor, Antonin Scalia.
The New York Times editorial board was still referring to Gorsuch's seat as "stolen" as conservatives chortled over the appointment. In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, the conservative legal academics John Yoo and Sai Prakash said that conservatives "hit the jackpot" with the Senate Republicans' gamble to block Garland's confirmation.
Yoo, the Berkeley law professor who wrote the infamous torture memo while with the Bush Justice Department, and Prakash, a U-Va. law professor, described Gorsuch as a "robust originalist," more like Clarence Thomas than the self-described "fainthearted originalist" Scalia. They saw him as part of a conservative bloc with Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. that would "expose" the "directionless middle" occupied by the others in the Republican-appointed majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and associate justice Anthony M. Kennedy.
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http://jostonjustice.blogspot.com/2017/07/gorsuch-more-conservative-than-scalia.html
