Trump’s Supreme Court pick wary of ‘politicians with robes’
Judge Neil Gorsuch recalls being blinded by tears in the middle of a ski run after someone rang his cellphone with news of the unexpected death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The reaction illustrates not only the depth of Gorsuch’s admiration for his mentor but also how thoroughly he has modeled his conservative constitutionalist views after Scalia.
“I immediately lost what breath I had,” Gorsuch, who sits on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, said in a speech last April. “And I am not embarrassed to admit that I couldn’t see the rest of the way down the mountain for the tears.”
One year later, the 49-year-old Colorado native is President Donald Trump’s pick to replace Scalia as the Republican leader heeded calls by many conservatives to find someone as near to a Scalia philosophical clone as possible.
Like Scalia, Gorsuch believes judges must focus primarily on the text of the 230-year-old Constitution and resolve legal disputes by following the Founding Fathers’ intentions. Gorsuch has said that if judges factor in personal beliefs, societal changes or calculations about maximizing social welfare, they risk becoming “little more than politicians with robes.”