Gorsuch Supreme Court Confirmation Enters Final Week

All day yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee held its final session for the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court.  Each of the committee members gave their speeches pro or con about this nominee, set to replace the late Antonin Scalia as an associate justice. Afterwards, the full committee voted and sent his nomination to the Senate floor for debate and final vote.  I watched much of the proceedings on C-Span2 and gained some insight into the various viewpoints on Gorsuch.  For example, I heard a couple of Democratic senators criticize the federal judge for excessive writings of concurrent opinions in various cases, opinions that in their opinion expressed an ideological purpose in altering the law and its interpretation...Judge Gorsuch was even known on a number of occasions to write concurring opinions to the majority opinions that he himself wrote.  One of these senators, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, contrasted this tendency of Gorsuch to try to broaden rulings to another federal appeals judge, Merrick Garland...nominated by President Obama in 2016 to fill the same seat for which Gorsuch is now being considered.  Garland is a minimalist, in the tradition of former Supreme Court Justice Byron White (for whom Gorsuch clerked), in that he seeks the narrowest application of law to a judgment and is thereby much less likely to make a politically-charged, judicially activist ruling.  But both Gorsuch and Garland are well-known on their courts as consensus builders with other judges...

I think it's a done deal, in spite of the Democrats staging a filibuster against Neil Gorsuch this week on the Senate floor, that this nominee will be confirmed by floor vote on Friday, when Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will have the rules changed to be able to end debate and invoke cloture by a simple majority vote.  I have my own concerns about Neil Gorsuch, especially how in some cases he has had a tendency to play around with the definitions of words in order to reach the conclusion he felt most comfortable with.  But he has sat on some 2,700 cases on his 10th Circuit Court of Appeals since 2006: 97% of the decisions there he voted unanimously with the other judges on that court and 99% of them he was on the majority side.   And I don't necessarily believe that you can rate a judge by how many times he rules on the side of the "little guy" versus how often he supports big money and corporations...judges are supposed to apply the law accurately and sometimes the compelling argument weighs on the side of the latter.  Although Neil Gorsuch is regarded as conservative and was nominated by a conservative Republican president, I think the real reason for the Democratic filibuster against him is the way Merrick Garland was summarily rejected out of hand last year by the Republican Senate leadership and not even accorded a hearing, much less a floor debate and vote.  For the Republican senators to express outrage at the Democrats' filibuster attempt is about as hypocritical as it can get.  Yet I don't favor a filibuster, either...getting a supermajority of votes (60) in order to close out debate and advance the Supreme Court confirmation process to a final floor vote has only become a significant factor in the process during the last few years...else why wouldn't the Democrats in 1991 have filibustered Clarence Thomas when he barely ended up confirmed by a vote of 52-48?  No, Neil Gorsuch will be our next Supreme Court justice, for better or for worse.  I'm a bit skeptical of him right now, but we'll just have to wait and see how well (or badly) he does...