Scalia's Legacy Lives On In Trump's SCOTUS Nominee

Judge Gorsuch maintains a deeply held conservative worldview that goes all the way back to his college days.

Judge Neil Gorsuch (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit)

Judge Neil Gorsuch (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit)

I still remember where I was standing when I learned that Justice Antonin Scalia had died. Sequestered in my Harvard Law apartment just above the winding brick streets of Cambridge, I felt my heart drop as I learned that Justice Scalia had passed suddenly at Cibolo Creek Ranch, just one day before Valentine’s Day.

For me, a conservative who felt outnumbered in the suffocating liberal confines of academia, Scalia’s sharp, pointed dissents served as my respite. His words were a refreshing burst of reality and commonsense in an environment where liberal groupthink dominated. I revered his bold, unflinching confidence in the face of opposition and his light, witty sense of humor that often accompanied his tenacity.

Scalia’s death brought a deep sense of grief, not only to me, but to the conservative legal community at large. For many of us, the election of Donald J. Trump brought hope to grief – hope that Scalia’s legacy would continue and hope that someone worthy of holding Scalia’s seat would succeed him.

We found that person in Judge Neil Gorsuch, nominated on Tuesday by President Trump to serve as the next Supreme Court justice.

As noted by Adam Liptak of the New York Times, Neil Gorsuch too remembers where he was when he learned of Scalia’s death; he was in the middle of a ski slope. Gorsuch recalls, “I immediately lost what breath I had left. And I am not embarrassed to admit that I couldn’t see the rest of the way down the mountain for the tears.”

But Gorsuch does not only cherish and commemorate the legacy of Scalia, he will continue it.

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As a staunch originalist and textualist, Gorsuch – like Scalia – is committed to enforcing the original meaning of the Constitution and the literal words of a statute. In true originalist form, he has been highly critical of Chevron deference, where the courts defer to federal agencies in interpreting a statute. “[E]xecutive bureaucracies… swallow huge amounts of core judicial and legislative power and concentrate federal power in a way that seems more than a little difficult to square with the Constitution of the framers’ design,” he wrote.

He prefers change to come via the democratic process, not unelected judges, and he views the appropriate role of a judge as minimalist, writing that “donning a robe doesn’t make me any smarter. But the robe does mean something… It serves… as a reminder of the relatively modest station we’re meant to occupy in a democratic society. In other places, judges wear scarlet and ermine. Here, we’re told to buy our own plain black robes.”

His preference for voters implementing change in society rather than judges is perhaps no more evident than in his work on social issues, where he has a proven track record of deferring to the people. He wrote in 2005, “American liberals have become addicted to the courtroom, relying on judges and lawyers rather than elected leaders and the ballot box, as the primary means of effecting their social agenda on everything from gay marriage to assisted suicide to the use of vouchers for private-school education.”

His career as a jurist has given life to those words. Gorsuch authored a concurrence in the famous Hobby Lobby case while sitting on the Tenth Circuit, where he concluded that government could not force employers to provide contraception in violation of their religious beliefs.

Gorsuch maintains a deeply held conservative worldview that goes all the way back to his college days when he co-founded two publications at Columbia University devoted to combatting the liberal political views that overwhelmed campus. In 2006, he wrote The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia (affiliate link), the most comprehensive book of its kind, upholding life and laying out the case against physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. In his book, he stated categorically that “all human beings are intrinsically valuable and the intentional taking of human life by private person is always wrong.”

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His long commitment to conservatism combined with his voluminous record of conservative writings suggest an incoming Supreme Court justice that will maintain his convictions like Justice Antonin Scalia rather than forsake them like Justice David Souter. In short, conservatives can rest assured Trump’s nominee will not betray them.

But Americans at large should also be comforted, for Gorsuch is committed to enforcing neutrally the text of statutes and the original meaning of the Constitution above his own personal beliefs. According to the Daily Signal, Gorsuch has said that cases demand that judges not be “diverted by personal politics, policy preferences, or what you ate for breakfast” and should instead “follow the law as written and not replace it with [one’s] own preferences, or anyone else’s.” Citing Scalia, Gorsuch understands what this means: “If you’re going to be a good and faithful judge, you have to resign yourself to the fact that you’re not always going to like the conclusions you reach.”

Indeed, his views in following the letter of the law and the original meaning of the Constitution have led him to take hardline stances on protecting the Fourth Amendment and the American citizen against unreasonable searches and seizures – a view that some describe as “liberal.”

Judge Neil Gorsuch will uphold the Constitution and the statutes implemented by the people’s representatives, and a “lion of the law” – Justice Antonin Scalia – will be his guiding compass. Today, conservatives nationwide can rest in the comfort of knowing the legacy of Scalia lives on.

Earlier: Prior ATL coverage of Neil Gorsuch


kayleigh-mcenany-2017Kayleigh McEnany is a CNN political commentator. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and she also studied politics at Oxford University. In addition to writing a column for Above the Law, she is a contributor for The Hill. She can be found on Twitter at @KayleighMcEnany.