WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch, a fast-rising conservative judge with a writer’s flair, to the Supreme Court Tuesday night, setting up a fierce fight over a jurist who could shape America’s legal landscape for decades to come.
Gorsuch, 49, is the youngest Supreme Court nominee in a quarter-century. He’s known on the Denver-based 10th Circuit Court of Appeals for clear, colloquial writing, advocacy for court review of government regulations, defense of religious freedom and skepticism toward law enforcement.
“Judge Gorsuch has outstanding legal skills, a brilliant mind, tremendous discipline and has earned bipartisan support,” Trump declared, announcing the nomination in his first televised prime-time address from the White House.
Gorsuch’s nomination was cheered by conservatives wary of Trump’s own fluid ideology. If confirmed by the Senate, he will fill the seat left vacant by the death last year of Antonin Scalia, long the right’s most powerful voice on the high court.
Trump praised the late justice. Gorsuch followed, calling Scalia a “lion of the law.”
Gorsuch thanked Trump for entrusting him with “a most solemn assignment.” Of his legal philosophy, he said: “It is the rule of judges to apply, not alter, the work of the people’s representatives. A judge who likes every outcome he reaches is very likely a bad judge.”
Some Democrats have vowed a vigorous challenge to nearly any nominee to what they see as the court’s “stolen seat.” President Barack Obama nominated U.S. Circuit Court Judge Merrick Garland for the vacancy after Scalia’s death, but Senate Republicans refused to consider any Obama choice.
Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer said he has “serious doubts” that Gorsuch is in the legal mainstream, saying he “hewed to an ideological approach to jurisprudence that makes me skeptical that he can be a strong, independent justice on the court.”
For some Republicans, the prospect of filling Supreme Court seats over the next four years has helped ease their concerns about Trump’s inexperience and temperament. Three justices are in their late 70s and early 80s, and a retirement would offer Trump the opportunity to cement conservative dominance of the court for many years.
Gorsuch would restore the court to the conservative tilt it held with Scalia on the bench. His writings offer insight into his leanings. He lashed out at liberals in a 2005 opinion piece for National Review, before he became a federal judge.
“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 for effecting their social agenda on everything from gay marriage to assisted suicide to the use of vouchers for private-school education,” he wrote.
Conservatives praise Gorsuch for his defense of religious freedom, including in a case involving the Hobby Lobby craft stores. He voted in favor of allowing for-profit secular corporations not to offer employee health plans that covered contraception if individuals who own or control the companies claim religious objections.
The judge also has written opinions that question 30 years of Supreme Court rulings that allow federal agencies to interpret laws and regulations. Gorsuch has said that federal bureaucrats have been allowed to accumulate too much power at the expense of Congress and the courts.
Like Scalia, Gorsuch sees himself as deciding cases by interpreting the Constitution and laws as they were understood when written. He has questioned criminal laws in a way that resembles Scalia’s approach to criminal law.
University of Michigan law professor Richard Primus said Gorsuch “may be the closest thing the new generation of conservative judges has to … Scalia.”
A conservative group has announced plans to buy $2 million worth of ads in support of the nominee in Indiana, Missouri, Montana and North Dakota, four states that Trump won and where Democrats must defend Senate seats in 2018.
