Gorsuch's Triumphs

The Atheist

The Grammar Tyrant
The Atheist
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If we're going to carefully scrutinise Kavanaugh's record since joining SCOTUS, maybe it's time to do the same with Neil Gorsuch.

From my distance, he appears to be the perfect Justice. I've noticed his name alongside RBG a couple of times, including an important dissent, so there's no questions of partisanship, and it looks like he's made decisions based on evidence and the Constitution rather than any political position.

I was very surprised to see such an alleged capital C conservative voting for FUCT in their copyright case, and I see he also sided with the liberal wing on Native American rights.

Am I missing something important, or is my assessment of Gorsuch as an excellent judge entirely correct?
 
The Atheist said:
If we're going to carefully scrutinise Kavanaugh's record since joining SCOTUS, maybe it's time to do the same with Neil Gorsuch.

From my distance, he appears to be the perfect Justice. I've noticed his name alongside RBG a couple of times, including an important dissent, so there's no questions of partisanship, and it looks like he's made decisions based on evidence and the Constitution rather than any political position.
...
Am I missing something important, or is my assessment of Gorsuch as an excellent judge entirely correct?
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Keep in mind that Gorsuch has only been sitting on the supreme court for a couple of years, and while supreme court rulings are generally important, none have been over the issue of abortion.

And while he has voted with Ginsberg on some cases, he has also voted in opposition to her in several cases:

- On multiple capital punishment cases
- On a First amendment (religious) case

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucklew_v._Precythe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_v._Alabama
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Legion_v._American_Humanist_Association

And even when Gorsuch voted with the more liberal judges, his decision wasn't necessarily based on ideology. (For example, one case where he voted with Ginsburg, his opinion was based on the ambiguity in the law.)

At this point, while a person can't dismiss the possibility that maybe Gorsuch will be a fair and non-ideological judge, its far too early to make that decision, and the evidence is suggesting that he will probably be more 'right wing' than 'impartial/swing vote/etc.'
 
A little more about Gorsuch's voting record:

From: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/neil-gorsuch-is-paying-off-for-trump-so-far/
(An article from mid-2017)...

Trump’s travel ban, while unanimously allowing the ban to take partial effect...Gorsuch wanted the court to go even further in allowing all of the travel ban to go into effect.
...
In each of the 15 cases he’s weighed in on so far, Gorsuch has sided with the court’s single most conservative member, Justice Clarence Thomas.

So, I think its safe to conclude that Gorsuch is a right-wing douche bag.

Maybe he may change over time... but I wouldn't count on it. And one or 2 rulings where he happens to side with Liberals for whatever reasons isn't really significant compared to the other rulings where he's been far-right.
 
"Along with Justice Clarence Thomas, he is an advocate of natural law jurisprudence."

Throw out the old Constitution and apply fictional natural law.
 
Segnosaur said:
And while he has voted with Ginsberg on some cases, he has also voted in opposition to her in several cases:

- On multiple capital punishment cases
- On a First amendment (religious) case
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Those are pretty predictable - anyone even slightly conservative is going to like the death penalty, and I always thought the cross case was bordering on vexatious - it's been there a century and crosses are highly associated with war deaths, even in very secular countries.

Segnosaur said:
In each of the 15 cases he’s weighed in on so far, Gorsuch has sided with the court’s single most conservative member, Justice Clarence Thomas.
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That, I didn't know. Interesting.

The thread can be a record of his voting and position.

It could be that Kavanaugh has already displayed all the hallmarks of a shocking Justoce that Gorsuch doesn't look too bad.
 
The Atheist said:
If we're going to carefully scrutinise Kavanaugh's record since joining SCOTUS, maybe it's time to do the same with Neil Gorsuch.

From my distance, he appears to be the perfect Justice. I've noticed his name alongside RBG a couple of times, including an important dissent, so there's no questions of partisanship, and it looks like he's made decisions based on evidence and the Constitution rather than any political position.

I was very surprised to see such an alleged capital C conservative voting for FUCT in their copyright case, and I see he also sided with the liberal wing on Native American rights.

Am I missing something important, or is my assessment of Gorsuch as an excellent judge entirely correct?
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He joined with the court in denying Brendan Dassey justice with no comment.

Here is a good summary

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...d3beccdd7a3_story.html?utm_term=.83a2953632ce

Who you understand is the American Teina Pora without the money grubbing aspect that Teina Pora employed for his descent into hell.

You should read the withering dissenting judgements by 3 women at Wisconsin Court of Appeals level prior to Gorsuch assenting to the travesty.
From the link:

"The three dissenting judges called the decision “a profound miscarriage of justice.”"

Gorsuch becomes jointly complicit, as does family pet RBG.
 
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Samson said:
He joined with the court in denying Brendan Dassey justice with no comment.
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Thereby following a long-established precedent, which is no doubt why RBG joined the consensus. US laws don't work like ours, and you should probably understand that before going off half-cocked.

Samson said:
Here is a good summary
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Lot of maybes in there.

If you want to point the finger at anyone, start with his mother and uncle. His mother allowed the interrogation, and the uncle could easily have said Brendan had no involvement.

Samson said:
"The three dissenting judges called the decision “a profound miscarriage of justice.”"
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While the majority opinion said:

"The interrogation took place in a comfortable setting, without any physical coercion or intimidation, without even raised voices, and over a relatively brief time. Dassey provided many of the most damning details himself in response to open-ended questions."

Yet, you know for sure it's wrong.

Has there ever been a murder conviction you agree with?

Gorsuch becomes jointly complicit, as does family pet RBG.[/QUOTE]
 
There are long threads on Brendan Dassey, and not a single contributor believes he is guilty. Steven Avery is another matter.

I will post the dissenting judgement to the correct thread, and that judgement should have alerted the supreme court that it is a matter of public interest. If there is a difference, our supreme court does not issue judgements without comment.
A judgement without comment is the total abrogation of responsibility, and exercised frequently at the USA supreme court. I would totally discount the idea that RBG is satisfied in the finality in Brendan Dassey as a factual matter, but I know this also to be true of our chief justice in Lundy.
They should all be in purgatory for their behaviour, including Gorsuch.
I see no point in discussing cases of obvious guilt, which comprise 99% of murder convictions, except to connect the dots and move on.
 
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Too soon to tell. However, there is a long tradition of SCt. justices not being the people their nominating presidents wanted them to be.
 
Samson said:
If there is a difference, our supreme court does not issue judgements without comment.
A judgement without comment is the total abrogation of responsibility, and exercised frequently at the USA supreme court. I would totally discount the idea that RBG is satisfied in the finality in Brendan Dassey as a factual matter, but I know this also to be true of our chief justice in Lundy.
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Jesus, I almost feel the need to resort to the rolling eyes emoji - I just knew Lundy would come up.

You're missing the point - SCOTUS was only interested in whether the procedure was fair & reasonable; they don't even consider guilt or innocence. They correctly decided the mother's and the defendant's consent was enough. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Please do start a thread on the guy, though - I promise to completely ignore it.

Loss Leader said:
Too soon to tell. However, there is a long tradition of SCt. justices not being the people their nominating presidents wanted them to be.
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Yep, true. I hope Gorsuch turns out to be one of those, but at least we know for sure he's capable of not taking the partisan line.
 
The Atheist said:
Jesus, I almost feel the need to resort to the rolling eyes emoji - I just knew Lundy would come up.

You're missing the point - SCOTUS was only interested in whether the procedure was fair & reasonable; they don't even consider guilt or innocence. They correctly decided the mother's and the defendant's consent was enough. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Please do start a thread on the guy, though - I promise to completely ignore it.
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Thank you for your brief essay on the function of Gorsuch and co.
You are right in a restricted sense, but a supreme court is supreme because it can do as it wishes, including correcting miscarriages of justice.
Well done for proclaiming the matter to be a triumph for any of them.
 
The Atheist said:
In each of the 15 cases he’s weighed in on so far, Gorsuch has sided with the court’s single most conservative member, Justice Clarence Thomas.
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That, I didn't know. Interesting.
...
It could be that Kavanaugh has already displayed all the hallmarks of a shocking Justoce that Gorsuch doesn't look too bad.
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That's certainly possible.

Or maybe Gorsuch saw the type of reputation that Kavanaugh has given the court and has decided to back away from being another right-wing rubber stamp.

Or maybe Gorsuch has seen the type of flack Trump and the Republicans are getting, and wants to appear a little more moderate for the next few years (until after the next election at least) before returning to his hard-right positions.

Or maybe its just a case of 'random noise'... picking out a few cases that don't really mean much of significance in order to paint him as a moderate and ignoring all the cases that DO show him taking a far-right stance.

But of all the possibilities, I'd probably go with your "Kavanaugh just makes him look better than he really is" theory.
 
applecorped said:
LOL, he voted along with some of the liberal justices so he must be okay.
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Uh, no.

What makes him look ok so far is not going along with the Republican agenda.

As noted, it's early days, and I want to keep a record of where he's going and what he's voted on.

The Great Zaganza said:
Gorsuch just help deliver unlimited Gerrymandering to Republicans.

In other words: whether or not the US is a democracy is of no concern to this Supreme Court.
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I was reading that this morning, and I tend to agree with the majority - it's a political issue not for the court to decide.

It works both ways, you know - and even if the Dems weren't on board with it, they will be now.

Segnosaur said:
And in another case, Gorsuch sided with other conservative judges (Kavanaugh, Alito, and Thomas) regarding the inclusion of a citizenship question on the census.
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That one's a bit more damning, and the dissent seems to be pretty lightweight.
 
The Atheist said:
Gorsuch just help deliver unlimited Gerrymandering to Republicans.

In other words: whether or not the US is a democracy is of no concern to this Supreme Court.
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I was reading that this morning, and I tend to agree with the majority - it's a political issue not for the court to decide.
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If its not for the courts to decide, then who will make the decision when a particular state is gerrymandered to the point where its unfair?

If you say "politicians should decide", how exactly will that work if one party has gerrymandered districts to the point where it is firmly entrenched in power?

It works both ways, you know - and even if the Dems weren't on board with it, they will be now.
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Actually it is true that the democrats have engaged in gerrymandering as well. I think the problem is the degree and effect that the republicans have taken the concept.
 
The Atheist said:
Am I missing something important, or is my assessment of Gorsuch as an excellent judge entirely correct?
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Depends on how you look at it.

Gorsuch's core beliefs are goofy IMO, but some of these cases indicate that he is at least trying to be consistent to his textualist/ originalist philosophy even when it leads to a result that would make conservatives mad. Scalia would do stuff like this, which is why a lot of people that didn't agree with his principles have some grudging respect for him.

However, in constitutional issues this philosophy means caring what a committee of white dudes who have been dead for 200 years would think, and that is where this textualist stuff really can go off the rails as speaking for the dead, especially the long dead, is ventriloquism.

Conservatives are more into pretextualism/ventriloquism than textualism, meaning that textualism is just a way for them to clothe their ideas as received wisdom. Alito is about as good of an example of this as there could be. Often there is little difference, but now and then a case comes down like this civil rights act case that makes it really, really clear what is up.
 
Suddenly said:
However, in constitutional issues this philosophy means caring what a committee of white dudes who have been dead for 200 years would think,...
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Seems to me a quite wide majority of Americans agree with that position - the Constitution is sacred.
 
The Atheist said:
Seems to me a quite wide majority of Americans agree with that position - the Constitution is sacred.
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I suspect the only things Trump knows about the Constitution is that he's head of the executive branch, is Commander in Chief, and can pardon people.

Can't say I was surprised by Gorsuch's opinion.

Interesting that Thomas wanted to review qualified immunity.
 
The Atheist said:
Seems to me a quite wide majority of Americans agree with that position - the Constitution is sacred.
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This is a large part of the problem seeing that almost none of them have any real understanding of the document. They waive it around as a talisman; like a flag with less nationalist overtones.

Calling a document that started with specific provisions protecting the slave trade as sacred is at best unsettling. Deifying the framers (as "founding fathers") is necrocracy, even ignoring most of them were objectively awful people. At least North Korea uses one guy who was alive 30 years ago. We have a committee dead for two centuries.

The constitution itself has a ton of provisions that are general and ambiguous. All forms of positive law are to some degree limited in this way. It is with rare exception impossible to draft a set of rules that address every possible application of those rules.

Especially as to constitutional law, the idea that all of these ambiguities can and should be decided in the way that the writers would have decided is daft. Both because it isn't all that knowable and that it is, ironically, unclear that the people who wrote the thing meant it to be applied that way in the first place.

Heck, Thomas Jefferson was against the idea that the Supreme Court should even address whether a law is constitutional. He argued it should be solely a political question left to the legislature and voters. Appealing to him as to whether a law is in violation of the first amendment (he was big on separation of church and state) misses that he was very clear that the courts should just STFU about that in the first place.
 
:confused: Then what did Jefferson thinks the courts where supposed to do? Pure ground level guilt and innocence for civil and criminal cases, no legal interpretation responsibilities?
 
Suddenly said:
This is a large part of the problem seeing that almost none of them have any real understanding of the document. They waive it around as a talisman; like a flag with less nationalist overtones.

Calling a document that started with specific provisions protecting the slave trade as sacred is at best unsettling. Deifying the framers (as "founding fathers") is necrocracy, even ignoring most of them were objectively awful people.
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I'm going to take issue only with the highlighted word.
 
JoeMorgue said:
:confused: Then what did Jefferson thinks the courts where supposed to do? Pure ground level guilt and innocence for civil and criminal cases, no legal interpretation responsibilities?
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It would just remove the constitution from the equation. His point would be that the legislative process would decide whether a law was constitutional and that was that. There are still a lot of legal issues left. Arguments over federal statutes, legal disputes between states, and so on.

This latest case would be fine with Jefferson. It applies a federal law to a set of facts. They didn't touch whether the law was in conflict with the constitution.
 
Suddenly said:
It would just remove the constitution from the equation. His point would be that the legislative process would decide whether a law was constitutional and that was that. There are still a lot of legal issues left. Arguments over federal statutes, legal disputes between states, and so on.

This latest case would be fine with Jefferson. It applies a federal law to a set of facts. They didn't touch whether the law was in conflict with the constitution.
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That strikes me as rather simplistic for Jefferson. Dude was smart enough to know that no law can be written with such perfection and precision as to never need intepretation.
 
Belz... said:
I'm going to take issue only with the highlighted word.
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Fair enough.

More precisely I'd say that they were people that did a lot of awful things which we've both buried and ignored for the sake of developing a national myth. They are hard to defend once that context and the BS that accompanies it is stripped away. Which is more what I mean by "objectively," and not in the sense that the moral nature of a person can be purely objective.
 
I think the fact that the Founding Fathers built into the core structure of their government methods for change because they knew they weren't the end all, be all decision makers of how America should be run in perpetuity is more than enough to square the circle of any questions of their place in our discourse.
 
JoeMorgue said:
That strikes me as rather simplistic for Jefferson. Dude was smart enough to know that no law can be written with such perfection and precision as to never need intepretation.
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Sure. He understood the need for a judiciary for precisely that point.

He just was against the idea that the judiciary was the right body to decide questions of constitutional interpretation unless those provisions directly applied to them.

To him, the legislative process was the proper venue for that discussion. Not the courts.

"The Constitution . . . meant that its coordinate branches should be checks on each other. But the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch."

—Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, 1804. ME 11:51
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https://www.landmarkcases.org/marbury-v-madison/thomas-jeffersons-reaction
 
To anyone thinking the recent ruling on Gay/Trans rights is somehow evidence that maybe Gorsuch might actually not be so bad...

Think again:

From: CNN
The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked the Trump administration's attempt to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an Obama-era program that protects hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought to the US as children from deportation. The 5-4 ruling was written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.

Notice who didn't join in the ruling? Gorsuch and Drunky McRapeface.
 
(Previously discussed in one of the basic Trump Threads.)

Another case where Gorsuch sides with the other Conservatives:

From: CNBC
The Supreme Court on Monday voted 5-4 to strike down a restrictive Louisiana abortion measure in a major win for reproductive rights activists, with Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the court’s four liberals.... The case involved a Louisiana abortion law requiring doctors who provide abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of their clinic....Roberts said his vote with the liberals on Monday was based on the top court’s precedent in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, a case the court decided in 2016.

You know who didn't join the law in supporting abortion rights (despite the fact that a very similar law was struck down recently)? Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

So, Gorsuch gets praise for supporting LGBTQ rights, then within a few weeks votes against both abortion rights, and immigrant's rights.

Still think that Gorsuch "isn't that bad"?
 
Segnosaur said:
Another case where Gorsuch sides with the other Conservatives:
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Yeah, I was reading the dissent this morning.

What it does is show what a thin line there is between yes and no.

It also emphasises that Clarence Thomas needs to drop dead shortly after the end of the year and get another liberal justice appointed in his place. I can understand Gorsuch going the way he did, but Thomas just looks like the world's worst Uncle Tom.
 
Nice to see the Trump appointees and alleged puppets voting against his attempt to keep his tax returns from other courts.
 
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