gorsuch 2 bak

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NO MERRI

SEE LEO JCN HONEST ELECTION PJT AMICUS

SEE 6-3 SUPERMAJORITY

renamed 2 1 24

see 1st amend

see press suppress sullivan v nyt libel

see alito. clarence

SEE IMP PREZ MARTIAL LAW POSSE C

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14TH AMEND

AN 6 26

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision striking down President Donald Trump's birthright citizenship executive orderin an opinion that was written by Chief Justice John Roberts. However, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson issued her own concurrence that targeted Justice Clarence Thomas by name.

After 31 pages of Roberts walking through the long history of birthright citizenship in the law, Jackson wrote a response to the dissent that Thomas penned along with Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.

"Despite his longstanding endorsement of a 'colorblind' Constitution, Justice Thomas now surprisingly suggests that the Citizenship Clause was a race-conscious remedial measure, relating only to 'freed slaves such as Dred Scott,' post, at 56, and those who shared with them certain characteristics ... It is for this reason, he says, that 'children who were born in the United States but [to parents] not domiciled here' are not entitled to claim birthright citizenship. ... But that narrow vision of the Fourteenth Amendment bears little relationship to the history of its ratification. Even worse, Justice Thomas’ telling elides the entire point of the Second Founding: The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery."

She goes on to allege that Thomas has a "myopic treatment" of the 14th Amendment.

"The Amendment caused a paradigm shift in the trajectory of our Nation; the teacher who scolds a student for bullying a classmate hopes the student learns the broader lesson of treating everyone with kindness, not just that one kid," she says.

She even went so far as to add an extensive footnote of cases "denied by this court" that refers back to Thomas' slavery argument.

"It is common ground that the Fourteenth Amendment was 'enacted ... with the one pervading purpose of securing equal citizenship for the freed slaves.' Also true is the fact that this Court 'has time and again denied Americans that promise.'"

Her footnote for that comment reads: "I suspect, though, that Justice Thomas and I disagree about when and how that promise has been denied by this Court. My list is long (and sadly only getting longer)." She cited 11 separate cases, the most recent of which refers back to a decision earlier this term in *Louisiana v. Callais.*

Jackson closes by saying, "Thankfully, a majority of the Court remembered this today, and has dutifully preserved the most basic animating principle of our Nation’s founding — that all human beings are created equal — once more."

Bill Shein called it a "blistering concurring opinion/takedown of Clarence Thomas's dissent."

Northwestern University School of Law Professor Paul Gowder said, "Justice Jackson knows what's up." He later added, "God bless Justice Jackson actually talking about what the Black folks who won the clause had said and done."

Loyola University School of Law Professor Justin Levitt wrote, "Justice Jackson is absolutely on fire in her birthright concurrence, unloading on the dissent not only for their votes in this case, but its apparent inconsistency with most of the 'colorblindness' jurisprudence of the past few terms."

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an 7 26

Over the weekend, conservative Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch made a claim that has MAGA in full meltdown mode. His assertion: that the First Amendment exists, and that the nation’s founders were not motivated by the Christian nationalism so often pushed by the far-right of today.

Gorsuch was speaking with PBS when he made a statement that has horrified MAGA, saying, “We were founded, a lot of our colonies, for our religious pluralism, right? And the opportunity to practice your own faith in your own way. And we were never supposed to be a nation that was about one race or one religion. It was about those ideas,” he noted, referring to America’s founding principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. “And those things are perfect ideas that speak to every human heart and that unite us all.”

Appointed to the Supreme Court by President Donald Trump in 2017, Gorsuch’s words flew in the face of assertions by the Christian nationalists of MAGA, like Vice President JD Vance, who has claimed, “Christianity is America’s creed, the shared moral language from the revolution to the Civil War and beyond.” Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, added, “Across that history, our country’s major debates have always centered on how we could best as a people please God.”

But according to the Hill, “Gorsuch took a different tact, pointing out that Charles Carroll, who was also Catholic, signed the Declaration of Independence alongside members of other Christian faiths. He also explained that Amish and Quakers settled in the then-British colonies.”

As Gorsuch put it, “We have a First Amendment for crying out loud. No established religion, everybody has a freedom of religion, everybody has the freedom of speech, we are all equal under law,” adding, “Now, you can not agree with those ideas, fair enough. Then we have a problem. But those three ideas are something all of us can unite behind.”

MAGA, however, is decidedly not uniting behind Gorsuch’s words.

“Wow — that is astounding historical ignorance!” posted one outraged Christian nationalist. “I wonder what ‘Creator’ he thinks they meant in the Declaration of Independence?”

“Our country is failing in every way possible because traitors to our founding and our nations principles are overthrowing it,” declared another MAGA adherent. “Now Gorsuch just said that our nation was not founded as a Christian nation. Everything that could go wrong, is going wrong. The communists and overlords are extremely powerful and there is no one to keep us on track with our constitution and with American principles. We also have a two tier justice system and our elections are stolen so we are ruled by anti Americans. Sad times, and to think ‘our side’ is in charge.”

“Good job GOP ... Three picks, three sellouts, cowards and gibbering clowns,” wrote another, referring to Gorsuch as well as Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, who have drawn MAGA’s ire recently for taking occasional stances against Trump’s agenda. “Screw originalism, the whole institution is rotten and should be ignored.”

“Really[?] So in dollar bill inscription IN GOD WE TRUST is totally Islamic and Muslim,” claimed yet another. “What ... plain imbecile human[!]”

The slogan “In God We Trust” was not added to U.S. currency by the country’s founders. It began appearing on select coins nearly 100 years after the Declaration of Independence, and was not added to paper currency like the dollar bill until 1955.

===

AN 5 26

Why even the MAGA far right has turned on Neil Gorsuch: political scientist - Alternet.org

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KICKASS 4 26

IF YOU GO BACK TO THE ORIGINAL BUG YOU ALSO SEE THE HONEST ELECTIONS PROJECT.

3:27

THIS WAS USED TO FILE AN AMICUS BRIEF IN THE SUPREME COURT WITHOUT DISCLOSING ITS AFFILIATION WITH THE JUDICIAL CRISIS NETWORK, WHICH SPENT

MILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO GET THREE LEONARD LEO-SELECTED SUPREME COURT JUSTICES APPOINTED TO THE COURT.

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AN 2 26

President Donald Trump is crossing “a dangerous line” by attacking the Supreme Court for overturning his controversial tariffs, according to America’s most distinguished organization of lawyers.

“The recent remarks by the president of the United States, leveling personal criticisms against members of the U.S. Supreme Court, are not acceptable and cross a dangerous line that threatens the safety of the judiciary and our judicial process,” declared American Bar Association (ABA) President Michelle A. Behnke in a statement.

“Vigorous debate over policy is a strength of our democracy, but attacks that demean the judiciary are not,” Behnke added. “Incendiary rhetoric has helped contribute to the alarming increase in attacks on and threats to our judges. It must stop.”

The ABA head is referring to Trump’s criticism of the six Supreme Court justices who ruled against his emergency tariff authority, including two jurists — Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — that Trump himself appointed. Deriding them as “fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats,” Trump said Gorsuch and Barrett are “an embarrassment to their families. You want to know the truth, the two of them.” He also said the liberal justices were loyal to the Democrats, which he admired, but added that he believes they are a “disgrace to our nation.” The president also claimed those judges were motivated by foreign powers, although did not provide evidence for this assertion.

“Personal attacks against individual justices, particularly allegations that they are influenced by ‘foreign interests,’ are wholly inappropriate,” Behnke criticized Trump in that statement. “Such statements risk undermining the rule of law and the public’s faith in an impartial judiciary, foundational pillars of our democracy that have guided our nation since its founding.”

She added, “The men and women of the Supreme Court, regardless of who appointed them, deserve respect for exercising their duty to interpret the Constitution faithfully and independently. The health of our constitutional system depends on maintaining that independence, free from political intimidation or retribution.”

Perhaps anticipating Trump’s lashing out, Gorsuch explained in his opinion that the president’s seeming desire to bypass the legislature to more effectively achieve his policy goals is dangerous to the American system of government.

“Yes, legislating can be hard and take time,” Gorsuch said. “And yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man.”

In addition to the ABA, one of the most prominent Republicans currently holding elected office also criticized Trump for his words about the Supreme Court. Former Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), who told Trump in a statement that "Congress is not an inconvenience to avoid." The conservative publication The Wall Street Journal similarly argued that Trump’s language was “ugly,” adding that “this is the same Court that ruled Mr. Trump’s way on presidential immunity, which was more personally consequential for this President.”

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AN 2 26

Conservative Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch's stance in the recent ruling against Donald Trump's tariffs hints at a "quite extreme" outlook on how government ought to operate, according to a new analysis from Vox, and it could potentially help the Court derail any future Democratic president's agenda.

Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, was among the six justices who ruled on Fridaythat the president had overstepped his authority when levying tariffs under a specific law, which the Court determined had not given the president the ability to set a new tax under certain circumstances. Digging deeper into the concurring opinions for Vox on Tuesday, legal correspondent Ian Millhiser highlighted a notable contrast between Gorsuch's view of the matter and that of Amy Coney Barrett, another Trump-appointed justice.

Both conservatives ultimately agreed that the law in question, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, did not see Congress delegate some of its power to set taxes to the president. Barrett, according to Millhiser, seems to believe that Congress is capable of making such a move, and that the Supreme Court could not bar a president from acting on that given authority. Gorsuch, meanwhile, appears to believe that the Court could override anything that the majority of justices disliked, even if it was accomplished by an act of Congress.

"Gorsuch is among the Court’s most outspoken judicial supremacists, and his opinions suggest that his Court should invalidate many federal policies even when those policies are authorized by an act of Congress," Millhiser wrote. "Barrett, by contrast, suggests that her Court should take a more humble approach when the two elected branches do not share the justices’ preferences — even as she also concludes that Trump’ s tariffs went too far."

This view from Gorsuch is unlikely to have much impact during the remainder of Trump's second term, as, despite Friday's ruling, the Supreme Court generally rules in his favor. However, Millhiser argued that it could have a substantial impact on the ability of a future Democratic president to govern, as even the authorization of a Democrat-led Congress could not save their plans from a contrary Supreme Court ruling.

"Though this disagreement did not shape the outcome of [Friday's decision], it could matter a great deal in a future Democratic presidency, if Congress authorizes that president to act in a way that Republicans find objectionable," Millhiser explained. "Gorsuch’s opinion indicates that he will likely strike down such an act of Congress — or, at least, to read it narrowly enough to prevent the president from doing as he or she pleases."

On the flipside, Millhiser noted that Barrett's view on the issue indicates that she might vote in favor of a future Democratic administration, even if she opposes their actions on political grounds.

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AN 1 26

An extensive new study from a team of Ivy League economists has uncovered just how much the Supreme Court has shifted towards favoring the wealthier side in any given case, with a New York Times report concludingreport concluding that you can "follow the money" to determine how it will in any given case.

The new study, dubbed "Ruling for the Rich," was published on Monday and hailed from the team of Yale's Fiona Scott Morton, Columbia's Andrea Prat and Columbia's Jacob Spitz. Adam Liptak, the leading Supreme Court correspondent for the Times, dug into its findings, noting that "the wealthy have the wind at their backs before the justices," and questioning whether or not they are living up to their oath to "do equal right to the poor and to the rich."

Per Liptak's analysis, the study found that Republican appointees, who have held a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court since 2020 and an overall majority for much longer, are "far more likely than Democratic ones to side with the wealthy," and adding "that the Supreme Court has become deeply polarized in cases pitting the rich against the poor." This is now in sharp contrast to the court of the mid-20th Century, "when appointees of the two parties were statistically indistinguishable" in terms of favoring wealthier parties.

Specifically, the study found that Republican-appointed justices sided with wealthier parties in cases around 70 percent of the time. By comparison, in 1953, conservative justices sided with them only 45 percent of the time.

Speaking with Liptak about the findings, Adam Cohen, author of the book "Supreme Inequality," noted that the study essentially reiterated ideas about the court's conduct that "some of us have been observing for a long time."

“But it is great to see,” Cohen added. “Respected academics crunching the numbers and producing the data to show that this is exactly what has been going on.”

These findings come as leaders in both political parties are ramping up plans to radically alter their campaign finance plans ahead of an upcoming decision, in which the court is widely expected to lift the limits on how much party committees and campaigns are allowed to coordinate with each other. This, experts argue, would hand even more power to the wealthiest donors and further erode the power of small-dollar donors.

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AN 12 25

The U.S. Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a rare, if temporary, loss on Tuesday, over his efforts to deploy the National Guard in Illinois.

The Court rejected the Trump administration’s emergency request to send troops to Chicago. The administration had claimed that troops were needed to protect federal agents.

“At this preliminary stage, the Government has failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois,” the Supreme Court declared, according to The Washington Post.

The Post called the ruling a “major defeat” for the Trump administration that “could have far-reaching effects,” and a “significant setback for his campaign to push troops into cities across the country over the objections of local and state leaders.”

In rebuffing Trump’s bid, NBC News reported, “the court at least provisionally rejected the Trump administration’s view that the situation on the ground is so chaotic that it justifies invoking a federal law that allows the president to call National Guard troops into federal service in extreme situations.”

“Those circumstances can include when ‘there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion’ or ‘the president is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.'”

The high court reportedly also cited the Posse Comitatus Act, which limits the use of the U.S. Armed Forces to enforce domestic laws.

Bloomberg Law’s Jordan Fischer reported that “In a 6-3 order, the court says at least at this stage the administration has not overcome the Posse Comitatus Act.”

Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, calling it a “Huge loss” for the administration, wrote: “SCOTUS tells Trump no on deployment of Illinois Nat’l Guard, finding a valid exception to the Posse Comitatus Act doesn’t exist.”

Dissenting were Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil M. Gorsuch.

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an 3 25

The new book Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful by The New York Times business investigations editor David Enrich chronicles an ongoing campaign by the wealthy and powerful to overturn the landmark Supreme Court decision New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, which in 1964 established bedrock protections against spurious defamation and libel cases in the U.S. legal system. By “subject[ing] people to this torturous, long-running and extremely expensive legal process,” those who can afford to pay for expensive and threatening defamation lawsuits can silence any public criticism and suppress others’ rights to free speech, says Enrich. “It has huge implications for our democracy and the ability of everyone to speak their mind.”

IFrame Content

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We turn now from attacks on the right to protest to attacks on press freedom. President Trump is escalating his criticism of the news media, claiming many outlets are engaged in illegal activity. This is part of what he said last week during a speech at the Great Hall of the Department of Justice.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I believe that CNN and MSDNC, who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party. And in my opinion, they’re really corrupt, and they’re illegal. What they do is illegal. … These networks and these newspapers are really no different than a highly paid political operative. And it has to stop. It has to be illegal. It’s influencing judges, and it’s entered — it’s really changing law, and it just cannot be legal. I don’t believe it’s legal.

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump’s comments come amidst a right-wing push to overturn protections for the press to investigate public figures, a right guaranteed by the landmark 1964 Supreme Court decision New York Times v. Sullivan.

We’re joined now by David Enrich. He’s New York Times’ business investigations editor. His new book is titled Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful.

If you can start off — it’s great to have you with us, David — by talking about what this Supreme Court decision, this landmark decision in the 1960s, Sullivan, was all about?

DAVID ENRICH: Well, it was brought on behalf of supporters of Martin Luther King, and it basically detailed this litany of abuses by Southern officials. The gist of it was completely true: Southern officials were trying to preserve white supremacy. Some of the facts were either wrong or exaggerated, and a powerful Southern official named L.B. Sullivan, sued The New York Times and won at trial. And the goal, basically, of Sullivan and his pals was that by filing lawsuits that seized on tiny little inaccuracies, you could punish the media for covering the civil rights movement.

And so, this went up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court ruled, in a unanimous decision in 1964, that in order to preserve free speech and allow people to write and criticize and investigate powerful people and institutions, the media and the public needed breathing room so that if they got a fact wrong by mistake or made an honest error, they would not be sued into oblivion. And so, that Supreme Court ruling has really set the stage for decades of investigative journalism and for normal people, non-journalists, as well, to speak up and kind of reveal abuses and criticize people who hold positions of power, both at the national level or at a community level, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: And what does this mean for the First Amendment?

DAVID ENRICH: And it means that the First Amendment gives everyone the right to speak and to interrogate powerful people, and you do not need to worry about — there should not be a legal cloud hanging over your head when you criticize or investigate someone powerful, and you do not need to worry that an innocent mistake is going to bankrupt you because of litigation.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s go back to 2016, Donald Trump vowing to make it easier to sue news organizations.

DONALD TRUMP: I’m going to open up our libel laws, so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money. We’re going to open up those libel laws, so that when The New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace, or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was before Donald Trump became president the first time around. Talk about the significance of what he’s saying and the overall campaign, as in your subtitle, the Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful.

DAVID ENRICH: Well, when Donald Trump made those remarks in 2016, it kind of acted as the firing of a starter’s pistol in a race, and it sent a signal to the entire kind of conservative movement, and, in particular, the conservative legal movement, that a race was on to try to dismantle some of the long-standing First Amendment protections for the media and for others. And you can trace very directly back to that speech that he gave in Fort Worth, Texas, in February of 2016 the arrival on the scene of this kind of small cottage industry of high-priced lawyers whose entire practices were devoted to suing and threatening news outlets.

And the more successes they piled up, the more the strategy caught on, so that by the time — and within a couple of years, there was a real grassroots movement, funded and fueled by the likes of the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, to really weaponize defamation laws to make it much, much scarier, really, especially for small and independent news outlets and journalists, to write about powerful people — not just the president of the United States, but across — but in their local communities, a big company, maybe a powerful real estate developer, things like that. And this strategy has now worked its way all the way up to the Supreme Court, where there is increasing support for either doing away with New York Times v. Sullivan altogether, or at least chipping away at it around the edges.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you’re the business investigations editor at The New York Times. What led you to write this book?

DAVID ENRICH: Well, we were getting, and still do get, inundated with legal threats basically every time that we start writing about or investigating someone powerful. And it occurred to me — you know, The New York Times is in a pretty good position to handle that kind of threat, but it occurred to me a few years ago that, you know, the experience might be very different if you worked at a smaller outlet or if you were an independent journalist. And, you know, there are so many independent journalists right now, which I think is a really good thing for the media and a good thing for our democracy. But it’s people with a Substack newsletter or a blog or a podcast who are uniquely vulnerable to these types of threats and these types of litigation, because they are enormously expensive to defend against.

And they’re not always meant to — these challenges are not always meant to win in court. They’re often meant to just subject people to this torturous, long-running and extremely expensive legal process. And a lot of people make the economically rational decision, which is that in the face of those threats and in the face of that litigation, they’re going to back down rather than fight, which is exactly what the people making those threats want you to do.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about how Hulk Hogan or, as you point out, much more relevantly, Peter Thiel fit into this story.

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah, so, Peter Thiel had a long-running grudge against —

AMY GOODMAN: And explain who he is.

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah, Peter Thiel is one of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley. He was an early supporter of Donald Trump, and he’s very closely aligned with people like Elon Musk. And he —

AMY GOODMAN: Co-founder of PayPal.

DAVID ENRICH: Co-founder of PayPal, yes, and one of the owners of Palantir, as well. And he had a long-running grudge against the website Gawker, because Gawker was really pioneering a form of journalism that was very skeptical of Silicon Valley elites and was kind of puncturing some of the bubble surrounding them. And so he set out in the early 2010s to destroy Gawker. And he went searching. He hired a bunch of people. He put a bunch of money into this. And he eventually settled on a case involving Hulk Hogan. Gawker had published a snippet of a sex tape involving Hulk Hogan.

And so, Peter Thiel secretly financed and organized a multifaceted legal campaign using Hulk Hogan as a vehicle for retribution against Gawker. He won — Hulk Hogan won. Peter Thiel won. Gawker was destroyed. And this became a real blueprint for other billionaires and other powerful people to really attack the media. They saw that they — a well-funded, well-orchestrated, secret legal campaign — had the ability to absolutely destroy a well-established media outlet.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Gawker was destroyed. Now talk about some of the Supreme Court justices’ views. Particularly begin with Clarence Thomas.

DAVID ENRICH: Well, Clarence Thomas, during his confirmation hearings in 1991, expressed real support for New York Times v. Sullivan. He then went through a period where he got some very negative media coverage, and his views seemed to shift. And so, by 2019, Clarence Thomas became the first sitting Supreme Court justice to openly call for the overturning of New York Times v. Sullivan.

His argument originally was grounded in the 45 words of the First Amendment, which do not mention libel or defamation, and therefore should not — he argued that should not be protected under the First Amendment. Really, though, this was a part of a campaign by Thomas and his allies to really erode the powers of the media and the protections for the media and normal people to speak up when they saw abuses and to criticize people like him.

And so, he, now joined by Neil Gorsuch, as well, have really embraced this call and are trying to recruit other justices, I think, and are calling for other people to file lawsuits that might make their way up to the Supreme Court that will challenge these long-standing precedents that protect, again, not just press freedoms, but the right of a person in a community to circulate a petition, for example, or make a comment on Facebook about their mayor, things like that. So this is not just about protecting journalists. It’s really about protecting anyone who wants to stand up and have their voice heard on matters of public importance.

AMY GOODMAN: Where does Neil Gorsuch stand?

DAVID ENRICH: Gorsuch has joined Thomas in wanting to have this overturned. And his views really — and he views Sullivan as protecting all sorts of online defamatory speech. The arguments that he has made — I mean, one of the things I do in this book is really deconstruct those arguments. And it turns out, a lot of them are premised on not just kind of faulty logic, but inaccurate data that he cited, that he got from a law review article that was filled with a lot of false assumptions and kind of misinterpreted data. And so, he has actually had to correct his opinion calling for the overturning of New York Times v. Sullivan, but it is still being cited to this day by the conservative legal movement as one of the real kind of sources of information and authority that should be used to overturn it.

AMY GOODMAN: You begin your book, the prologue, “A Panicked Phone Call.” You tell the story of Guy Larson [sic]. Tell us who he — Guy Lawson — is.

DAVID ENRICH: So, Lawson is an American journalist and author who wrote a book that became the basis for the movie War Dogs, with — starring Jonah Hill. And the book basically tells the story of how these three stoners from Miami Beach become international arms traffickers. It’s kind of a rollicking, really fascinating tale. Some of the action is set in Albania. And there’s a bit part in the book played by the son of Albania’s former prime minister, who is kind of an autocratic strongman. And the details in the book, as far as I’ve been able to determine, were completely accurate. But for argument’s sake, the son of the strongman claims that he was kind of smeared in the book and that some of the facts were wrong, so he filed a lawsuit against Lawson in U.S. court, and it’s worked its way — it’s been kind of years winding its way through the legal process. It got dismissed by multiple courts. But years later, it worked its way up to the Supreme Court, and it became one of the latest vehicles to try and challenge Sullivan.

:{And it was seized on by people who had been inspired by Clarence Thomas, who had basically issued an open invitation to lawyers and, you know, prospective litigants, begging them to bring him a case that he could used to overturn Sullivan. It made its way up to the Supreme Court. They did not get enough votes to actually overturn Sullivan, or even hear the case, but it became another vehicle for Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch to really, you know, bring this issue much more to public light and to argue forcefully that Sullivan should be overturned.

And those calls, while unsuccessful — they did not get the Supreme Court to change the legal standard — they inspired hordes of lawyers, activists and other judges at lower levels across the country to really lean into this argument. And you can look at cases all over the country, and you can see that they are slowing down, they are taking longer, they’re not getting dismissed as quickly. And that creates all sorts of pain and difficulties for — especially for local and independent journalists, who now have much kind of higher odds of being dragged through expensive litigation.}:

AMY GOODMAN: So, you talk about — let’s look a some of the cases that President Trump is involved with right now. He sues ABC. He sues The Des Moines Register. He sues CBS. Is he trying to bring these cases to the Supreme Court? Now, of course, ABC, there was a settlement. Explain what these cases were about and what it means to settle.

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah, well, first of all, Trump is very much trying to get a case to the Supreme Court that will lead to the overturning of Sullivan. I don’t think any of those three cases you mentioned are the likely vehicles, but there are a bunch of others working their way through the federal appeals system that I think stand a much better chance.

These more recent lawsuits against ABC, CBS and The Des Moines Register are all pretty clearly efforts by Trump and his allies to weaponize the law to get — to kind of punish criticism and to deter others from speaking up and saying critical things. And they involve different legal theories. The ABC case was a straight-up defamation case. The Des Moines Register and the —

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, ABC case, where George Stephanopoulos had said President Trump —

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — was found civilly liable for rape. Now, again —

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — the judge in the case said, in common parlance, this case would be about rape.

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah, and even in the technical details, that he was actually found liable by the jury for sexual abuse, not rape. But so, even if you assume, for argument’s sake, that that’s an important difference and that Stephanopoulos got it wrong — and I think Stephanopoulos would say he didn’t get it wrong — but for argument’s sake, let’s say he did get it wrong. That is exactly the type of mistake that is supposed to be protected by New York Times v. Sullivan, because it is an honest, good-faith error, and you should not be held liable. ABC nonetheless decided that it was prudent to settle this case.

AMY GOODMAN: Or Disney did —

DAVID ENRICH: Well, right.

AMY GOODMAN: — which owns ABC.

DAVID ENRICH: Disney, as parent company, did. And, I mean, I think the rationale for that — and we’re seeing this play out in other settings, as well — is that these big multinational companies, that have varied interests, are trying to protect their corporate interests and do not feel like having outstanding litigation against the president of the United States is in their best interest, and so they are, pretty clearly, I think, taking the side of their profits in the long term over the First Amendment concerns that many of their journalists have. And you’re seeing a very similar dynamic playing out with CBS right now.

AMY GOODMAN: And CBS is the case of 60 Minutes.

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And Trump is suing them for $20 billion, I think, at this point, for how they edited a Kamala Harris piece.

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah, and this is the very definition of what I think is a meritless lawsuit. And at the time the lawsuit was filed, there were some discrepancies in the way CBS kind of cut or aired parts of Kamala Harris’s interview with 60 Minutes. We now have the full, unedited transcript. We have the full, unedited recordings of those interviews. And it is plainly clear, objectively, that the interview, while edited, was not done so deceptively. There are not material differences between the different things that aired on different CBS shows. And so, the lawsuit, clearly, to me at least, and certainly all the legal observers I’ve spoken to, with the exception of people aligned with Trump, is not a strong legal argument. And yet, CBS’s parent company, which has a multibillion-dollar merger pending, that it needs —

AMY GOODMAN: Paramount.

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah — that it needs federal approval for, has started talking with the Trump side about possibly settling this. And the rationale, again, is quite clear: They are concerned, on the Paramount side, that if they do not settle this, that the Trump administration is going to essentially punish them by holding up this multibillion-dollar merger. And so, you have journalists and, I think, media executives at CBS who are apoplectic about the prospect of settling this, because, A, they are on very strong legal footing, and, B, it would set a terrible precedent that the companies are going to cave to this kind of legal extortion. But I think — we’ll see what happens.

AMY GOODMAN: How does protection of the press in the United States compare to other countries? And talk about libel tourism.

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah. So, the U.S. is — the First Amendment is a really special thing in the U.S. It’s one of the things that distinguishes America from many other democracies. So, if you look at countries like the U.K., for example, or Australia, which are, you know, very democratic — small-D democratic countries, it is much harder for journalists and others to write critical things or to investigate powerful people and institutions in those countries, because their libel laws make it much easier to sue, and that also allows you to much more easily and kind of potently threaten people.

And so, you have — in the U.K., for example, we’ve had this phenomenon, as you just said, called libel tourism, where people, rich people, like Russian oligarchs, and big companies file lawsuits against journalists from all over the world in the British court system. And that has created a real chilling effect even for American journalists, who sometimes find themselves getting sued in British courts just because you published something. It goes online. It’s accessible probably everywhere in the world. That can expose you to liability in the British court system.

Now, it’s getting a little bit harder to actually bring those suits right now, but, to me, it’s a really clear reminder of the importance of the protections we have in the U.S. It really does differentiate this country from many others. And it means we have a much more robust and aggressive media. And again, it also means that just normal people who want to circulate a petition online can do so without fear that if they get a fact wrong, they are not going to be bullied and intimidated and potentially sued because of just minor inaccuracies.

AMY GOODMAN: So, finally, after you wrote this book, Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful, were you more or less hopeful?

DAVID ENRICH: Oh my goodness, less hopeful. We have a real problem right now in this country. We have very strong legal protections, and yet people and companies and institutions are, on a daily basis, threatening journalists and threatening normal people, and they are getting their way a lot of the time, and that’s with our legal protections in place. And the assault on these protections is very much underway. It’s a very much alive threat, I think. And we’re seeing the White House engage in this almost on a daily basis, it seems. So I think the threat is growing, and it has huge implications for our democracy and the ability of everyone to speak their mind and criticize powerful people.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to talk about some of the particular cases you look at in the book after the show, and we’ll post it as a web exclusive at democracynow.org. David Enrich, New York Times business investigations editor. His new book, just out, Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful.

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10 24 master class scotus? AFP lawsuit camp finance disclose

overturn 9th?

10 24 master class scotus? CU did not get --> AFP lawsuit camp finance disclosure?

Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta - Ballotpedia

Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta is a case that was argued before the Supreme Court of the United States on April 26, 2021, during the court's October 2020-2021 term. It was consolidated with Thomas More Law Center v. Bonta (formerly Thomas More Law Center v. Becerra).

:{In a 6-3 opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit's ruling and remanded the case for further proceedings, holding that the district court was correct in entering judgment in favor of the petitioners and :{permanently enjoining the California Attorney General from collecting their Schedule B forms}:, and that the Ninth Circuit erred when it vacated those injunctions and directed the entry of judgment for the attorney general.

Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the majority opinion of the court. Justice Clarence Thomas filed a concurring opinion. Justice Samuel Alito filed a concurring opinion, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch. Justice Sonia Sotomayor filed a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.^[1] Click here for more information about the ruling.}:

HIGHLIGHTS

The case: Two conservative advocacy groups, the Thomas More Law Center and Americans for Prosperity, challenged a California policy requirement that tax-exempt §501(c)(3) charitable organizations must disclose the names and addresses of major donors. The groups argued that the policy violated the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. On appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled in favor of the state. Click here to learn more about the cases' background.

The issues: The cases concerned governmental disclosure requirements for charitable organizations' donor lists and the Supreme Court's decision in NAACP v. Alabama.

The questions presented: "Whether the exacting scrutiny this Court has long required of laws that abridge the freedoms of speech and association outside the election context—as called for by NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U.S. 449 (1958), and its progeny—can be satisfied absent any showing that a blanket governmental demand for the individual identities and addresses of major donors to private nonprofit organizations is narrowly tailored to an asserted law-enforcement interest."^[2]

The outcome: The U.S. Supreme Court reversed the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit's ruling and remanded the case for further proceedings.

The case came on a writ of certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. To review the lower court's opinion in the consolidated cases, click here.^[3]

Timeline...

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https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/supreme-court-upholds-funding-structure-consumer-financial-protection/story?id=110067134

gorsuch alito

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an ah 8 24

With its 6-3 GOP supermajority, the U.S. Supreme Court is now, critics say, dominated by hard-right ideologues. But in an article published on August 12, Vox's Ian Millhiser warns that the High Court could move even further to the right if former President Donald Trump defeats Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. And if that happens, Millhiser argues, there is a good chance that the First Amendment will suffer.

"The good news for proponents of free speech is that, based on the Court's most recent First Amendment decisions, it does appear to have a 6-3 majority in favor of preserving the post-1960s understanding of that amendment," Millhiser writes. "The bad news is that there are three justices willing to drastically shrink the protections offered by that amendment. And those three could easily swell to five if former President Donald Trump gets to appoint more justices to the Court."

Millhiser adds, "Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one member of the Court's pro-free speech majority, is now 70. Chief Justice John Roberts, another member of that majority, will turn 70 shortly after the next president is inaugurated."

The Vox journalist notes that Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch "have openly called for New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), the fount of press freedom in the United States, to be overruled" — and Trump agrees with them.

"More broadly, Sullivan stands for the proposition that state governments cannot use defamation law to maliciously target the press," Millhiser explains. "If a reporter makes a serious error, that reporter may still be liable for defamation. But governments that want to shut down a newspaper cannot simply wait until a reporter misremembers which song was sung at a rally, and then pounce with a multi-million-dollar lawsuit."

Millhiser points out that many times in U.S. history, the First Amendment has come under attack — from the Comstock Act to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) "ramping up his witch hunts against suspected communists."

"In the American system, where justices serve until they retire or die, no one can be sure how much power each president will have to reshape the Constitution," the Vox journalist observes. "A vote for Trump is a vote to roll the dice on a drastically different vision of free speech in the United States — one that bears far more resemblance to the not-so-distant past than it does to anything most modern-day Americans have experienced."

READ MORE:[Inside the GOP plot to silence Texas voters

*Read the full Vox article at this link.

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an 8 24

There is already a growing bloc on the right flank of the Supreme Court that wants to cripple key elements of the First Amendment, warned Ian Millhiser for Vox — and if former President Donald Trumpis given another term, he could possibly add enough justices to let that actually happen.

It comes down to a pair of key rulings from the 1960s: Brandenburg v. Ohio, which protected political agitators' right to speech, and New York Times v. Sullivan, which limited the government's right to sue the news media — a practice long used by segregationists to suppress the Civil Rights Movement.

Before that point, Millhiser wrote, free speech existed as an idea, but not a court-enforced reality: "Dissidents were commonly thrown in prison, often for many years, when the government disagreed with their views. Near the end of World War I, the great union leader Eugene Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison for giving a speech opposing the draft, and his conviction was upheld by a unanimous Supreme Court. In 1951, as Sen. Joseph McCarthy was ramping up his witch hunts against suspected communists, the Supreme Court blessed his and similar efforts by upholding the convictions of several individuals who did nothing more than try to organize a (wildly unsuccessful) Communist Party in the United States."

Today, the First Amendment truly protects protesters and journalists — and for now, the Supreme Court has a majority upholding this. But some far-right Supreme Court justices want to turn back the clock.

"Justice Samuel Alito, in a pair of opinions joined by Thomas and Gorsuch, spent the last two years unsuccessfully fighting in favor of laws that seem designed to challenge the modern understanding of free speech," wrote Millhiser. "These two cases, known as *Netchoice v. Paxton* (2022) and *Moody v. Netchoice* (2024), concerned Texas and Florida laws that would essentially allow the Republican governments of those states to seize control of content moderation at major social media outlets like Facebook or YouTube." Ultimately, the court reined in these laws — but these three justices wanted them to stand.

And it's not hard to envision Trump would appoint more justices who agree with them. On the campaign trail, he has vowed to "open up our libel laws" to let reporters be sued over their stories, and he also suggested deporting the students who protested the Israel-Hamas War on college campuses earlier this year.

"If Trump wins, and if he gets to fill just two more seats on the Supreme Court, Americans could swiftly lose First Amendment rights that have been secure for nearly six decades," Millhiser wrote.

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Supreme Court sides with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, spurning a conservative attack

wASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a conservative-led attack that could have undermined the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The justices ruled 7-2 that the way the CFPB is funded does not violate the Constitution, reversing a lower court and drawing praises from consumers. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion, splitting with his frequent allies, Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, who dissented.

The CFPB was created after the 2008 financial crisis to regulate mortgages, car loans and other consumer finance. The case was brought by payday lenders who object to a bureau rule that limits their ability to withdraw funds directly from borrowers’ bank accounts. It’s among several major challenges to federal regulatory agencies on the docket this term for a court that has for more than a decade been open to limits on their operations.

The CFPB, the brainchild of Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, has long been opposed by Republicans and their financial backers. The bureau says it has returned $19 billion to consumers since its creation.

Justice Alito’s home flew flag upside down after Trump’s ‘Stop the Steal’ claims, report says

Supreme Court orders Louisiana to use congressional map with additional Black district in 2024 vote

Justice Kavanaugh says unpopular rulings can later become ‘fabric of American constitutional law’

Outside the Supreme Court following the decision, Warren said, “The Supreme Court followed the law, and the CFPB is here to stay.”

President Joe Biden, a fellow Democrat who has taken steps to strengthen the bureau, called the ruling “an unmistakable win for American consumers.”

Unlike most federal agencies, the consumer bureau does not rely on the annual budget process in Congress. Instead, it is funded directly by the Federal Reserve, with a current annual limit of around $600 million.

The federal appeals court in New Orleans, in a novel ruling, held that the funding violated the Constitution’s appropriations clause because it improperly shields the CFPB from congressional supervision.

Thomas reached back to the earliest days of the Constitution in his majority opinion to note that “the Bureau’s funding mechanism fits comfortably with the First Congress’ appropriations practice.”

In dissent, Alito wrote, “The Court upholds a novel statutory scheme under which the powerful Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) may bankroll its own agenda without any congressional control or oversight.”

The CFPB case was argued more than seven months ago, during the first week of the court’s term. Lopsided decisions like Thursday’s 7-2 vote typically don’t take so long, but Alito’s dissent was longer than the majority opinion, and two other justices, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote separate opinions even though they both were part of the majority.

Consumer groups cheered the decision, as did a bureau spokesman.

“For years, lawbreaking companies and Wall Street lobbyists have been scheming to defund essential consumer protection enforcement,” bureau spokesman Sam Gilford said in a statement. “The Supreme Court has rejected their radical theory that would have devastated the American financial markets. The Court repudiated the arguments of the payday loan lobby and made it clear that the CFPB is here to stay.”

Jesse Van Tol, president and CEO of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, said the decision upholding the consumer bureau’s funding structure would have positive effects across the U.S. economy.

“It’s always nice to see the courts get something right — especially in this tawdry circumstance where payday loan predators sought to wriggle out of basic oversight using absurd distortions of law and fact,” Van Tol said in a statement.

While the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and some other business interests backed the payday lenders, mortgage bankers and other sectors regulated by the CFPB cautioned the court to avoid a broad ruling that could unsettle the markets.

In 2020, the court decided another CFPB case, ruling that Congress had improperly insulated the head of the bureau from removal. The justices said the director could be replaced by the president at will but allowed the bureau to continue to operate.

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gorsuch icwa

https://www.alternet.org/elie-mystal-gorsuch-black-rights/

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Convicted Trump aide Peter Navarro asks Justice Gorsuch to spring him from federal prison - Alternet.org

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AN AH 1 24

When former Rep. Anne Gorsuch Burford (R-Colorado) — the late mother of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch — was heading the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the early 1980s under President Ronald Reagan, she drew a great deal of criticism from environmentalists and some Democrats in Congress for weakening air and water regulations.

Burford ended up resigning, much to the disappointment of her son (who was in his teens at the time).

In an article published by CNN on January 17, Supreme Court analyst Joan Biskupic stresses that Justice Gorsuch has followed in his mother's footsteps with "his own brand of defiance and anti-regulatory fervor."

"In recent years," Biskupic explains, "Justice Gorsuch has voted against regulations that protect the environment, student-debt forgiveness and COVID-19 precautions. During a COVID-19 spike in early 2022, Gorsuch was the lone justice who declined to wear a mask while sitting on the bench. He has led calls on the Court for reversal of a 1984 Supreme Court decision that gives federal agencies considerable regulatory latitude and that, coincidentally, traces to his mother's tenure."

On January 17, according to Biskupic, the High Court is scheduled to hear arguments in cases testing the Reagan-era 1984 ruling in Chevron USA, Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council.

"The issue comes down to Congress' ability to write open-ended laws that delegate policy details to agency officials," the CNN journalist notes. "The Chevron principle dictates that when disputes arise over regulation of an ambiguous law, judges should defer to agency interpretations of the law if the interpretations are reasonable. The Chevron case has steered disputes over countless directives intended to protect the public, such as from air pollution, workplace hazards, risky drugs and medical fraud, or to guarantee certain benefits, such as people with disabilities and elderly."

U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, according to Biskupic, will defend that 1984 ruling.

Prelogar, in a filing, told the Roberts Court, "Overruling Chevron would be a convulsive shock to the legal system. All three branches of government, regulated parties, and the public have arranged their affairs for decades with Chevron as the backdrop against which Congress legislates, agencies issue rules and orders, and courts resolve disputes about those agency actions."

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an 1 24

harvard University President Claudine Gay announced her resignation Tuesday, January 2, following weeks of criticism of her testimony during a December antisemitism on college campuses Capitol Hill hearing, as well as accusations of plagiarism.

The Harvard Crimson reports, "Though Gay initially signaled that she would try to weather the charges of plagiarism, at first defending her scholarship and then making a series of corrections, the steady stream of new allegations — which continued to roll in during the final days of her presidency — only added to doubts about Gay’s fitness to effectively lead Harvard."

A Wednesday, January 3 report from Politico notes conservative activist Christopher Rufo "has been at the forefront of a sprawling campaign to force Gay to resign," and "was in a celebratory mood" after she announced her exit.

Author and editor at The Yale Review, James Surowiecki, took to X (formerly Twitter) to write, I assume Christopher Rufo will now move on and insist that Neal Gorsuch step down from the Supreme Court, given that he plagiarized parts of his 2006 book 'The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia'" — and he attached a screenshot from a 2017 Politico article, which includes a side-by-side of language from Gorsuch's book and language from a 1984 article in the Indiana Law Journal."

doc

IFrame Content

Surowiecki went on to write, "The defenses of Gorsuch's lifting, btw, were remarkably similar to the defenses of Gay's work: it was just 'sloppy,' not 'mendacious' or malicious, and was not serious because while it copied language, it didn't involve the purloining of ideas."

Per Politico's 2017 report, documents provided to the news outlet "show that several passages from the tenth chapter of his 2006 book, 'The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia,' read nearly verbatim to a 1984article in the Indiana Law Journal. In several other instances in that book and an academic article published in 2000, Gorsuch borrowed from the ideas, quotes and structures of scholarly and legal works without citing them."

According to the report, despite former President Donald Trump's White House at the time denying any "impropriety," there were "six experts on academic integrity contacted independently by POLITICO" who "differed in their assessment of what Gorsuch did, ranging from calling it a clear impropriety to mere sloppiness."

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https://www.alternet.org/chevron-doctrine/

no lnx twt

'Judicial power grabs': US Supreme Court puts Chevron doctrine 'squarely in the crosshairs'

Brett Wilkins and Common DreamsMay 01, 2023

The U.S. Supreme Court said Monday it will hear a challenge to a nearly 40-year administrative law precedent under which judges defer to federal agencies' interpretation of ambiguous statutes—a case that legal experts warn could result in judicial power grabs and the gutting of environmental and other regulations.

The Supreme Court said it will take up Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo—a case in which fishing companies are seeking to strike down the Chevron doctrine, named after the landmark 1984 Chevron USA v. Natural Resources Defense Council ruling that conservatives have long sought to overturn. The case is one of the most cited precedents in administrative law.

The Chevron doctrine involves a two-step process in which a court first determines whether Congress expressed its intent in legislation, and if so, whether or not that intent is ambiguous.

James Goodwin, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Progressive Reform, toldPolitico that Loper v. Raimondo has "the potential of being one of the most destabilizing decisions that this court has issued."

President Joe Biden's "environmental and energy agencies were already facing a heavily tilted playing field in the federal judiciary," Goodwin added. "I think eliminating Chevron... would make the prospects of surviving judicial review all the more daunting."

At issue in Loper v. Raimondo is whether the federal government can force herring fishers to fund a National Marine Fisheries Service program used to monitor their work. Two fishing companies argue that while the Magnuson-Stevens Act requires owners of fishing vessels to accommodate federal monitors onboard, the proprietors are not required "to pay the salaries of government-mandated monitors who take up valuable space on their vessels and oversee their operations."

The Biden administration's argument in favor of the Chevron doctrine leans heavily upon precedent.

"Federal courts have invoked Chevron in thousands of reported decisions, and Congress has repeatedly legislated against its backdrop," a brief filed by U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar and other officials in support of the doctrine notes. The brief adds that the Chevron doctrine "promotes political accountability, national uniformity, and predictability, and it respects the expertise agencies can bring to bear in administering complex statutory schemes."

In 2020, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in Howard v. United States that "Chevron is in serious tension with the Constitution," while Justice Neil Gorsuch opined last year in Buffington v. McDonough that the doctrine "deserves a tombstone no one can miss."

"Overruling the Chevron doctrine, and undermining agencies and regulatory authority more broadly, has long been a hobbyhorse of Neil Gorsuch and other conservatives," legal journalist Christian Farias tweeted. "In a sense, the outcome of this case is foreordained. It's part of a continuing agenda."

Liberal Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson has recused herselffrom Loper v. Raimondo, explaining that she sat on the circuit court that initially heard the case.

"I still want to know how Ketanji Brown Jackson feels about all of this," Farias wrote. "Her insights are valuable: She was the vice chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, an agency that is given Chevron-like deference in some contexts. Making her sit this one out won't help."

Justice Clarence Thomas defends ‘family trips’ with GOP donor

BY EKATERINA PECHENKINA

Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), a frequent critic of Supreme Court ethics rules, sent a statement responding to POLITICO’s inquiry about Gorsuch’s sale of the Colorado property.

“We have seen a steady stream of revelations regarding Supreme Court Justices falling short of the ethical standards expected of other federal judges and of public servants,” said Durbin. “The need for Supreme Court ethics reform is clear, and if the Court does not take adequate action, Congress must. The Senate Judiciary Committee will be closely examining these matters in the coming weeks,” said Durbin, who has asked Chief Justice John Roberts to testify next month on the court’s ethics rules.

Kedric Payne, director of ethics at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, said he believes “investments in LLCs require more details than the justice includes in his financial disclosures.“

“This transaction appears to also require naming the buyer. The public has a right to know that justices will fully comply with disclosure rules instead of providing only a tiny peek into their financial disclosures,” he said, noting more facts are needed to distinguish whether it’s a disclosure omission or violation. The center was founded by a Republican former chair of the Federal Election Commission.

Unlike Crow, who bought properties from Thomas, Duffy says he is neither a friend nor a confidant of Gorsuch. But he is one of the nation’s most powerful attorneys.

His Greenberg bio describes him as “A true ‘working CEO,’” and says he “focuses his practice on trial and appellate work in the class action, employment, energy, commercial contract, and product liability areas, serving as counsel in high-profile cases throughout the United States.”

At the time of the sale, Duffy had headed Greenberg Traurig for about a year. A search of his contributions to political candidates revealed that they went primarily to Democrats, including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, (D-N.Y.). He contributed the maximum amount allowable for individual donors to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, though he also made contributions in the past to Republicans such as former Sen. John McCain of Arizona and a GOP New York City mayoral candidate, Joe Lhota.

The Duffy family has long resided in Colorado. Duffy attended the University of Colorado Law School and, in 2019, he was the recipient of the “most admired CEO” award by the Denver Business Journal.

Duffy, who described himself as an avid fly fisher, said he’d been looking for the right property for his family for many years. Duffy said he did not know Gorsuch was one of the owners when he made his first offer.

“The fact that he was going to be a Supreme Court justice was absolutely irrelevant to the purchase of that property. It’s a wonderful piece of property and we’re so glad we bought it,” said Duffy.

Gorsuch and his associates purchased the property in 2005 through their LLC, the Walden Group, which was dissolved after the 2017 sale. The home was originally listed, in July of 2015, for $2.495 million. The fact that the property had sat on the market for so long and that its price had been lowered a couple times suggests the partners were having trouble finding a buyer.

The real estate transaction is another example of how the lack of a firm code of ethics for the court stands in contrast to most other branches of the U.S. government, including the White House and Congress as well as lower court judges.

The code of conduct for lower court U.S. judges says judges should “avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety in all activities,” and “discourages frequent transactions or continuing business relationships with lawyers or other persons likely to come before the court” on which the judge serves. Unlike many of the country’s state and federal courts, the Supreme Court lacks a code of conduct.

LEGAL

Supreme Court responds to lawmakers on ethics complaints

BY JOSH GERSTEIN

“This is exactly the type of situation that an ethics code that included vetting of transactions and full disclosure would clear up,” said Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, a progressive research organization. “Without decisive action, the conservatives on the Supreme Court will forever tarnish its reputation in our public life,” he said.

At the time of Gorsuch’s appointment, his ownership of the Colorado property drew attention only for the fact that his co-owners were major figures in the oil and gas industry. Gorsuch’s ties to the oil and gas industry run deep.

As a lawyer at a Washington law firm nearly 20 years ago, Gorsuch represented oil and gas billionaire Philip Anschutzon a variety of matters as outside counsel, and it was through this connection that Gorsuch befriended his future real estate partners.

Anschutz helped Gorsuch win an appointment to an open seat on a federal appeals court in Denver, including directly lobbying the George W. Bush White House....Gorsuch’s connections to Anschutz extend to .

The Walden Group included Kevin Conwick, who had advised Anschutz in deals to buy sports teams and other projects like the Staples Center in Los Angeles, and Cannon Harvey, who oversaw Anschutz’s venture capital investment division...

an 3 23 zzz https://www.alternet.org/ron-desantis-2659533898 ...How DeSantis declared war on the last century’s 'most important 1st Amendment decision': legal analyst

Alex Henderson March 08, 2023

Gov. Ron DeSantis and his MAGA Republican allies in the Florida State Legislature have made no secret of their disdain for the mainstream media. During a roundtable discussion that he hosted in February, DeSantis argued that it should be easier to sue journalists for defamation. And a Republican ally, Florida State Rep. Alex Andrade, later proposed a bill that would do exactly that: Florida House Bill 951.

Andrade's bill would be a blatant violation of New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision that set a tough standard for proving defamation. Under Sullivan, defamation must involve "actual malice," which is very difficult to prove. Dominion Voting Systems is trying to show "actual malice" in its $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against right-wing Fox News, and ironically, the voting technology company would have an easier time proving its case if the High Court overturned Sullivan and agreed with Andrade's bill. Andrade and DeSantis believe that Sullivan was wrongly decided.

Meanwhile, Florida State Sen. Jason Brodeur (another Republican DeSantis ally) has proposed a bill that would require bloggers who write about state officials to register with the state government and file regular reports on their activities. Even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia) has slammed the Brodeur-sponsored Florida Senate Bill 1316 as unconstitutional, tweeting, "The idea that bloggers criticizing a politician should register with the government is insane. It is an embarrassment that it is a Republican state legislator in Florida who introduced a bill to that effect. He should withdraw it immediately."

READ MORE: Civil libertarians slam Ron DeSantis’ 'brazen and blatantly unconstitutional' war on press freedom

In a scathing op-ed published by The Guardian on March 7, journalist Trevor Timm — executive director and co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation — warns that DeSantis and his allies have declared an all-out war on the U.S. Constitution's 1st Amendment. And Timm is as critical of Andrade's bill as he is of Brodeur's.

"Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, and his cronies, not content with destroying free speech in public schools, have set for themselves a new target: destroying press freedom and every Floridian's right to criticize public officials," Timm argues. "Along the way, they aim to overturn the most important 1st Amendment U.S. Supreme Court decision of the 20th Century."

The decision that Timm is referring to is, of course, New York Times v. Sullivan. Timm notes that DeSantis and his allies are hoping to "weaken the 'actual malice' standard from Sullivan, to make it easier for public officials to sue newspapers or critics."

"Now, can states just pass laws that blatantly ignore Supreme Court precedent? Of course not," Timm explains. "Any responsible judge would strike this down as unconstitutional right away. But DeSantis may be hoping for a friendly appeals court ruling from a Trump-appointed judge or Supreme Court showdown to revisit the Sullivan ruling — following the same decades-long Republican strategy that finally overturned Roe v. Wade. And in the meantime, DeSantis can burnish his anti-media bona fides for his presidential run, and Republican legislatures around the country can use the opportunity to copy the bill or one-up him."

READ MORE: FL GOP bill would 'allow government officials to harass and bankrupt' opposers with defamation lawsuits

Timm points out that "many legal scholars consider" Sullivan the greatest 1st Amendment victory of "the last century" — a victory that DeSantis and his allies would like to roll back.

"It is one of the primary reasons newspapers in the U.S. can aggressively report on public officials and powerful wealthy individuals without the constant fear that they are going to be sued out of existence," Timm observes. "And up until a few years ago, when Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch started criticizing it, everyone assumed it was settled law."

Timm compares Brodeur's blogger bill to a draconian law that was passed under President Vladimir Putin in Russia in 2014.

"The proposed law, authored by state legislator Jason Brodeur, would — I kid you not — compel 'bloggers' who criticize the governor, other officers of the executive branch, or members of the legislature to register with the State of Florida," Timm observes. "Under the bill, anyone paid to write on the internet would have to file monthly reports every time they utter a government official's name in a critical manner. If not, they'd face potentially thousands of dollars in fines. It's a policy so chilling that it would make Vladimir Putin proud, and I wish that was hyperbole."

Timm continues, "In 2014, Russia's autocratic leader signed a very similar provision, then known as the 'blogger’s law.' As The Verge explained at the time, 'under it, any blogger with more than 3000 readers is required to register with the Roskomnadzor, Russia’s media oversight agency."

The agency that Brodeur has proposed would be similar to the pro-Putin Roskomnadzor, Timm argues.

"DeSantis has turned Florida into a national laboratory for speech suppression," the journalist warns. "And every American, Republican or Democrat, should be horrified."

READ MORE: How an overtly 'authoritarian' Florida GOP bill is designed to silence anti-DeSantis bloggers: journalist

Read Trevor Timm’s full op-ed for The Guardian at this link.

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A closer look at Judge Neil Gorsuch and class actions

When Justice Antonin Scalia died on February 13, 2016, one of the petitions for review awaiting the Supreme Court’s consideration was an appeal by Dow Chemical Co., which had asked the court to review the billion-dollar judgment against the company in a price-fixing case. But less than two weeks later, Dow announced that it was settling the case for $835 million. The company maintained that it “was not part of any conspiracy and the judgment was fundamentally flawed as a matter of class action law.” But, Dow explained, that the settlement was nonetheless “the right decision for the company and its shareholders” in light of uncertainty stemming from “recent events within the Supreme Court and increased likelihood for unfavorable outcomes for business involved in class action suits.”

Dow pointed to two important class-action decisions, both authored by Scalia and decided by a vote of 5-4, on which it had relied. In *Wal-Mart v. Dukes*, the court struck down a lower-court ruling that approved the certification of a class of roughly 1.5 million Wal-Mart female employees, who had argued that the leeway over pay and promotions that the store gives to its local supervisors discriminates against women. The court ruled that the women lacked the kind of common legal claim that would allow them to bring a lawsuit collectively, because they were suing “about literally millions of employment decisions at once.” And in *Comcast v. Behrend*, the justices held that the lower courts were wrong to certify a class of cable-television subscribers in an antitrust lawsuit against the cable company because the subscribers could not show that their damages could be measured on a classwide basis. Although Dow emphasized that, in its view, the judgment against it violated both of those decisions, it opted to settle the case rather than take its chances with a Scalia-less court.

Covering the Wal-Mart decision for this blog, Lyle Denniston described Scalia as the court’s “most dedicated skeptic about the class-action approach to litigation.” Whether Gorsuch, if confirmed, would follow in Scalia’s footsteps remains to be seen. During his decade on the bench, Gorsuch has participated in relatively few class action cases. In the cases involving class action issues in which he has participated, he has generally, but not always, ruled for the defense. Notably, both in cases in which he has ruled for the defense and those in which he has ruled for the plaintiffs, Gorsuch has emphasized the need for courts to stay in their lane, so to speak – that is, not to exceed their authority, particularly when it comes to decisions that are in his view best left to Congress.

Gorsuch adhered to this principle just a few months ago in ruling for the defense in *Hammond v. Stamps.com*, a case in which the on-demand postage company had wanted to remove a proposed class action against it, in which the plaintiffs alleged that the company’s monthly subscription costs were misleading, from a New Mexico state court to federal court. The district court ruled that the company could not remove the case because the Class Action Fairness Act’s “amount in controversy” requirement – more than $5 million – had not been met: The company could not show how many of its customers who cancelled their accounts had actually been misled, rather than cancelling for other reasons.

In an opinion by Gorsuch, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit reversed, emphasizing that the district court’s conclusion that the “amount in controversy” requirement had not been met “rests on a legal error about the meaning of a key statutory term” – “in controversy.” In other contexts, the court explained, the phrase “has never required a party seeking to invoke federal jurisdiction to show that damages ‘aregreater’ or will likely prove greater ‘than the requisite amount’ specified by statute.” Instead, it has “required a party seeking federal jurisdiction to show only and much more modestly that ‘a fact finder might legally conclude’ that the damages exceed the statutory amount.” With no reason to believe that Congress intended the term to have another meaning in the CAFA, Gorsuch concluded, “[o]ur job is to abide Congress’s policy directions, not replace them with others of our own hand.”

Gorsuch thus agreed with the district court “that it is unlikely all 312,000 persons who cancelled service” will actually be entitled to damages, and he acknowledged that the district court had articulated “the correct legal test for jurisdiction (focusing on what’s legally possible, not what’s likely).” But the district court failed to actually apply the correct test to the facts of the case, instead “mistakenly focusing not on the legally possible but the factually probable. And that is an error of law we are not free to disregard.”

In :{McClendon v. City of Albuquerque:(style="border:0px;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, Gorsuch once again relied on the idea of the court’s limited authority, but this time to rule in favor of the plaintiffs in what he described as a “long-running” class action challenging the conditions in city’s jails. The question before the court was whether an order withdrawing approval of a class action settlement was a “final decision” that would allow the defendants – city and prison officials – to appeal....

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/conservative-supreme-court-justices-tortured-reasoning-in-the-disastrous-wisconsin-case-is-a-thin-excuse-for-their-true-purpose/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/the-supreme-court-is-poised-to-extend-gun-rights-at-the-worst-possible-time/

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The Supreme Court is poised to extend gun rights at the worst possible time

Supreme Court of the United States

Written by Bill Blum / Independent Media Institute April 8, 2020

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” —Second Amendment to the United States Constitution

As the deadly COVID-19 contagion sweeps across the country, gun sales are surging, spurred in many regions by panic buying and purchases by first-time firearm owners. Fearful and insecure Americans are taking advantage of weak and ineffective gun-control laws and stocking up, as President Trump might say, “like never before.”

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is poised to issue its first major Second Amendment opinion in more than a decade in a case that originated, fittingly, in New York City, now the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States. The case—New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York—has the potential to vastly extend the rights of gun owners, and not just in New York, but throughout the entire nation.

At issue is a New York City “rule” (the term the city uses for its local ordinances) that was adopted in 2001 to prohibit residents from transporting licensed handguns beyond municipal limits. The rule was challenged in a federal lawsuit filed in 2013 by the NRA’s New York affiliate and three individuals. A district court judge ruled in the city’s favor in 2015, as did the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 2018. The Supreme Court, however, agreed to review the case at the NRA’s request in January 2019, and heard oral arguments in December.

The plaintiffs contend that the city’s handgun transportation ban should be declared unconstitutional because it conflicts with the Supreme Court’s landmark 2008 decision on the Second Amendment, District of Columbia v. Heller.

In Heller, the Supreme Court struck down a ban on handgun possession in the nation’s capital, ruling for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to gun ownership. Deeply controversial and hotly contested, Heller split the Supreme Court along strict ideological lines, and was resolved on the basis of a 5-4 vote of the justices. The late Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion stood the prior judicial consensus on the Second Amendment on its head, rejecting the great weight of prior scholarship and earlier court opinions, including the Supreme Court’s 1939 decision in United States v. Miller, that had construed the amendment as protecting gun ownership only in connection with service in long-antiquated state militias.

Scalia’s opinion was met by a blistering dissent written by Justice John Paul Stevens, who retired from the bench in 2010 and passed away last year. Drawing on a wide array of historical sources, Stevens chided Scalia for ignoring the actual debates that took place during the founding era on the ratification of the Constitution and the drafting of the Second Amendment. Those debates, in Stevens’ view, demonstrated the amendment’s purpose was not to safeguard individual gun rights, but to guarantee the survival of the militias as a “collective right” of the citizenry as an alternative to the creation of a large federal standing army.

Stevens lost the battle of persuasion in Heller, and in 2010, in another 5-4 decision that also featured a Stevens dissent—McDonald v. Chicago—the Supreme Court extended Heller, holding that the individual right to keep and bear arms was incorporated by the 14th Amendment’s due process clause and hence was applicable to the states and local governments. The Second Amendment, as interpreted by Scalia, thus became the law of the land.

Although Scalia and Stevens are no longer with us, the ideological divisions they represented remain on the Supreme Court today. Indeed, when it comes to gun rights, the current court is even more conservative than it was in 2008. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, both appointed by Trump, are outspoken proponents of Scalia’s vision of the Second Amendment. And the tribunal’s remaining conservatives—Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito—participated in Heller and joined Scalia’s majority opinion.

Still, Heller by no means precluded all measures of gun control. As the Second Circuit noted in its evaluation of the New York handgun transportation ban that is now before the court, Heller was technically limited to possession of guns in the home, and established no clear limits on legislation aimed at regulating gun rights outside of the home.

“Like most rights,” Scalia wrote in Heller, “the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited… [N]othing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

And in an enigmatic footnote to the above paragraph, Scalia added: “We identify these presumptively lawful regulatory measures only as examples; our list does not purport to be exhaustive.”

Adhering to Scalia’s reasoning, in the years following Heller, lower courts have upheld a broad range of state and local gun-control regulations, a dynamic that has prompted the NRA and other gun-lobby groups to urge the Supreme Court to take up another Second Amendment appeal to reaffirm the amendment’s importance and place stricter limits on gun control. They may have found the perfect test case in the New York transportation ban. Like Heller, the New York ban concerns an outright prohibition, which will be hard, if not impossible, to justify before the court’s conservative majority.

Realizing it would likely lose the case, New York City amended its transportation rule in June to permit residents to take their handguns to second homes, businesses or shooting ranges outside city limits. And in July, the city filed a formal motion with the Supreme Court, requesting that the case be dismissed as moot. The court denied the motion in October, setting the stage for another Second Amendment showdown.

In December’s oral arguments, the city again asked the court to moot the case. The city made no attempt to defend the transportation ban.

Unfortunately, given the city’s capitulation and the Supreme Court’s right-wing orientation, the only real remaining question is the scope of the NRA’s inevitable victory. Even if the court reconsiders the city’s request and enters a dismissal order, the NRA will walk away with a significant win, having forced the city to rescind one of the most stringent gun-control laws in the country. On the other hand, a decision on the merits on constitutional grounds in the NRA’s favor would reward the organization with an even bigger triumph, endangering gun-control laws everywhere.

A nation awash in firearms in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic awaits the court’s decision, which is expected by the end of June.

Bill Blum is a retired judge and a lawyer in Los Angeles. He is a lecturer at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication. He writes regularly on law and politics and is the author of three widely acclaimed legal thrillers: Prejudicial Error, The Last Appeal, and The Face of Justice.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/bill-moyers-and-dahlia-lithwick-break-down-how-the-courts-have-proven-they-have-trumps-back/

Bill Moyers and Dahlia Lithwick break down how the courts have proven they have Trump’s back

President Donald J. Trump, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh and Anthony M. Kennedy, retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, walk together Monday, Oct. 8, 2018, to the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)

Written by Bill Moyers / BillMoyers.Com March 24, 2020

Dahlia Lithwick: Hi there.

Bill Moyers: Greetings, Dahlia. How are you?

Dahlia Lithwick: Hi, how are you? I’m okay.

Bill Moyers: No fever, coughing or sneezing?

Dahlia Lithwick: Coughing and sneezing, but no fever and none of the other alarm bells, so I’m just sitting tight.

Bill Moyers: I appreciate your joining me.

Dahlia Lithwick: Of course.

Bill Moyers: I guess you won’t be hanging out at the Supreme Court anytime soon, right?

Dahlia Lithwick: No. No, they’re not hanging out there either, so. It’s really unprecedented to just scuttle arguments. Justice Ginsberg is 87, so I think it is for the best. But it is really extraordinary times that we are living through.

Bill Moyers: Yeah, I remember something you said, “If ever there was a time for the American legal profession to put down its yellow pads and stand up for the rule of law, it’s today—”

Dahlia Lithwick: Yeah, after Donald Trump was elected, I felt so strongly that lawyers were gonna be the bulwark, that it was clear that he was gonna be assailing the rule of law, and then I really believed that lawyers were going to find lines that couldn’t be crossed.

And that the United States was a country that was built on the proposition that there is no king, and that you have nothing if you don’t have the rule of law. I mean, I think I really believed all that. And who are the gladiators in that fight if not the lawyers?

I did expect that lawyers would be on the front lines. And I watched the day of the travel ban a week after the inauguration — it was the lawyers who ran out to the airports. It was the lawyers who parked themselves at the baggage claims [and] held up signs that said, “I’m just a tax attorney, but I’m here to help you get into the country–” I mean, I really thought that was setting a precedent wherein the lawyers were always gonna be the first ones out. And I’m not sure that materialized the way I expected.

Bill Moyers: If lawyers are failing us, where are we?

Dahlia Lithwick: I think there are so many component pieces of that. I think that you can look at the Mueller Report and the ways in which the findings of that report were distorted by Donald Trump’s own attorney general to imply that nothing had gone wrong.

I think you can look at declarations of emergency at the border last year, where no emergency existed, just to get funding that Congress had already said they were declining to offer. The travel ban itself. One after another, actions taken that really pushed the boundaries of what the executive branch can do.

And just the sort of dispiriting ways in which the Justice Department has doubled down on pressing some of those truly lawless actions, and so we saw Bill Barr at the highest levels of the Justice Department interfere with the Roger Stone sentencing.

This was unprecedented. Nobody had ever seen the president by tweet say, “Maybe we should change the sentence,” and have Bill Barr and very, very senior members of the Justice Department intervene — where line prosecutors had been working on this case for years. And I think we saw on that day, we saw four DOJ (Department of Justice) lawyers walk away from the case, one from the Justice Department, rather than be involved in that prosecution anymore.

But I think it can’t be these tiny little acts of resistance. It really does require the kinda thing that I think we saw in the days following, where we had thousands of prosecutors signing memos and immense numbers of former Justice Department officials saying, “We can’t proceed this way.”

But I think maybe the answer to your question is that so much of the rule of law, as it turns out, was built on soft norms, not on regulations and statutes and constitutional directives. And I think that we all think that this machinery is more robust than it really is. It turns out it’s tissue thin if we don’t fight for it.

Bill Moyers: I used to think that norms were sort of the unwritten Constitution like English procedures and propriety. But that doesn’t seem to hold up anymore.

Dahlia Lithwick: I remember when Merrick Garland was denied a hearing or a vote or even courtesy meetings in the Senate. And I thought, at the time, this is a norm. It is a norm that the president gets to put up a nominee, and that person gets a hearing and a vote. And I think that, time and time and time again in the last few years, I’ve found myself answering these questions about how can this be happening? How can Bill Barr personally intercede in the Roger Stone sentencing?

I think the answer is those were a bunch of norms that were put together post-Watergate. They never had the force of law. It was a set of decisions that this is how the polity would thrive post-Watergate. And I think it’s just such a chilling lesson for all of us that this is a series of gentlemen’s agreements about how we conduct ourselves; it’s not the law.

Bill Moyers: In the meantime, as you’ve written, Trump has weaponized the law in several ways. Talk about that for a moment.

Dahlia Lithwick: Well, I think the most chilling [thing] that we are seeing now is certainly the use of his own Justice Department to go after anybody who’s been disloyal. And also, as we just mentioned, using the Justice Department to exculpate, whether it’s through a lighter sentence for Roger Stone, or using his pardon power to pardon people like Joe Arpaio right at the very beginning.

Trump: I stand by my pardon of Sheriff Joe and I think the people of Arizona who really know him best would agree with me.

Bill Moyers: Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio who took a hard-line against immigrants.

Dahlia Lithwick: Who had people in camps dying on his watch, who had this hard-line, anti-immigrant worldview that was so brutal — that there was no question that what he was accused of doing, he had done. And I think that time and time and time again, we’re seeing Donald Trump use the pardon power to say, “There’s really no such thing as white collar crime. There’s no such thing as being too hard on illegal immigrants. There’s no such thing as being — whatever it is that he himself — sometimes — engages in.”

And I think that, in addition to really kind of rejiggering the entire Justice Department so that it seems as though it answers to him personally, I mean, that’s always been his worldview. He wanted an attorney general and he complained about Jeff Sessions, that Jeff Sessions wasn’t loyal, and he wanted Jim Comey to be loyal. Even Don McGahn, his White House counsel, who ended up leaving, was not sufficiently loyal.

And I think he’s really got a notion that he’s like a Nero character — an emperor — and that the law works for him and responds to him. And in so many different configurations, we’ve seen him rescinding DACA by tweet. Making decisions about the dreamers thousands and thousands of dreamers on a whim. Making decisions about “don’t ask, don’t tell” on a whim.

And then we have the entire apparatus of government scurrying to effectuate that, to make it happen for him. But I guess the paradox is not just that he’s weaponized the rule of law, but that the rule of law has rushed to meet him, and to bolster his notions that he is above the law.

Bill Moyers: How do you battle with someone who thinks the law is just a win-or-lose game? And a commodity you can buy and sell? How do you deal with that? How do we fight back?

Dahlia Lithwick: One of the most revelatory books I’ve read this year is by an attorney whose name is Jim Zirin. He has a book out that talks about all the ways in which Donald Trump as president is behaving exactly the way Donald Trump as quote/unquote real estate mogul behaved.

There was a playbook, and it long predates the presidency. This was, believe it or not, the Roy Cohn playbook that goes all the way back to Donald Trump and his dad when they were accused of racist practices in rentals long ago. And it’s a really useful sort of road map to know what the behaviors are. And the behaviors are pretty typical if you are a real estate, very, very wealthy real estate mogul because it’s the same things over and over: It’s sue everybody, chill people from coming forward by terrorizing them. Make sure that your plaintiffs are subject to heinous, horrific abuse, repeated abuse, until they can’t [fight back] anymore.

Bill Moyers: And at the right time, to your advantage, you walk away from the mess you’ve created, declare bankruptcy, and leave the laborers, the contractors, the everyday workers, the creditors to bear the costs, right?

Dahlia Lithwick: Just bury them in litigation, bury them in discovery so that they don’t wanna go forward with the lawsuits. File all sorts of frivolous, frivolous claims, knowing that at some point, you’re just exhausting the other side. I mean, these are just the ways that this person who in his capacity as Donald Trump before he was president just used the levers of the legal system constantly.

He would be sued. He would have people who did work on his properties that he never paid. Trump University, the casino bankruptcies, every one of these lawsuits — he just fought back by hiring armies of lawyers who did what he said. And you’re quite right. The cost of picking up the debris afterwards, whether it’s Trump University or Trump steaks or whatever the detritus is, that’s not on the rich guy. That’s not on his lawyers. They profit either way.

That is exactly how he uses his private attorneys. That’s how he was using Rudy Giuliani, to go and stir up dirt and all sorts of false claims about Joe and Hunter Biden in Ukraine. So he has a very myopic kind of transactional view of lawyers are his — they’re his plumbers. They get the job done.

Bill Moyers: And they’re well paid for it.

Dahlia Lithwick: We’re learning there are many fundamental flaws in the system of capitalism that we have tethered ourselves to. But one of the flaws is that, for a very, very long time, rich men — whether it was Harvey Weinstein or Donald Trump — very, very rich men were able to surround their selves with armies of loyal attorneys who would do whatever they were asked to do. And that’s exactly how he’s trying to use his Justice Department today.

Bill Moyers: When a president takes his playbook from a crooked lawyer like Roy Cohn in the 1970s and uses it to run the United States government today, what are we supposed to do?

Dahlia Lithwick: It’s such a different paradigm because every president, whether or not you agreed with George Bush, used his White House counsel in certain ways, [and] used the Justice Department and his attorney general in certain ways. But [now] we have a president who simply just indefatigably using his lawyers to beat up the weak and to protect his own usually financial interests. And so there’s not a model on a big constitutional scale for what you do when the president wanted a Roy Cohn, got a Roy Cohn in Bill Barr, and is proceeding to just break stuff.

Bill Moyers: Has it occurred to you that the president prefers to govern by chaos, I mean, it detracts journalists from covering other things he’s doing. I’m reaching right now on my desk for a story I read just this morning in CounterPunch. The headline is, “The Supreme Court is set to strike a major blow against social and environmental protections.” It would amount to the evisceration of regulations that protect our health and safety as citizens. Did you know about this? Are you aware of this?

Dahlia Lithwick: Yeah. This is part of a really — and you’re so right. This is happening almost in the dark of night. It’s happening on page A12, if there at all, because page A1 is the chaos. And way, way back, under the fold in the middle of the paper, there is this stealth attack on government agencies and their ability to regulate themselves. And you’re also quite right, it is happening, at the U.S. Supreme Court under our noses. And, what you’re describing is the sort of ascendancy of what was once a kind of fringe theory that Justice Antonin Scalia put forth about agencies and the limits on their power. And this idea of the unitary executive, that every single thing in the executive branch is subordinate to the president.

That was a crackpot idea once upon a time. And you are quite right, it is pushing its way into the very epicenter of several arguments that the Court is hearing this year. And this idea that — it’s called technically the nondelegation doctrine, and it essentially says that we can gut agency authority, for instance the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. We can gut agencies’ ability to have kind of ongoing oversight of problems.

It was once seen as a really fringe idea that is now being used. I think Justice Elena Kagan has described it as it is going to be used to end government as we know it.

Bill Moyers: She’s actually said that the conservative majority will eventually essentially rule that, quote, “Most of the government is unconstitutional.” And it makes me think, and I wonder if it does you, that the right wingers on the Court were put there to enact the Republican platform into law.

Dahlia Lithwick: It’s such a good question and it’s funny because it gets ignored. We get very, very focused, I think, on Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh and questions of abortion, and maybe to a lesser degree questions of religious liberty, right? The Hobby Lobby questions about whether religious dissenters can be forced to do things they don’t want to do.

But I think you’re exactly right, that simmering under those issues both Kavanaugh and Gorsuch were quite openly kind of auditioning to be on the Supreme Court with their writings, very explicit writings in the vein that you’re describing. Writings that would seek to do away with the administrative state, do away with the power of government regulatory agencies, whether it’s the (CFPB Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) or the EPA. Efforts to essentially say all of those agencies answer to the president and he can hire and fire at whim. And he can constrain their authority at whim.

That was not a stealth campaign. They were doing that, both justices — Gorsuch and Kavanaugh — were doing that very, very openly, talking about those things. And I think you’re quite right, we got very, very hyper-focused in both of their confirmation hearings on other issues, equally important issues. But I think we looked away from their records on hobbling federal government as we know it. And you’re quite right, I think they were put on the Court to do just that. And we’re seeing, in two short years, they are doing just that.

Bill Moyers: Brett Kavanaugh wrote last year in favor of forbidding Congress from allowing federal agencies, quote, “To exercise regulatory authority over a major policy question of great economic and political importance.” But I thought Congress was supposed to deal with questions like that. What do you make of this?

Dahlia Lithwick: What I make of it is exactly the words you just said, which is this would give the Supreme Court itself authority to say, “Yeah, we just don’t like these regulations. These ones are not good. This agency isn’t right.” And to really eviscerate the regulatory state as we know it. And this goes way beyond the 2020 election. If you have a 5-4 majority on the Court that really believes that using these kinds of doctrines to chip away at agency power, this is going to be kind of sealed into the mix for decades.

Bill Moyers: So you’ve written, Dahlia, about how, in recent years, the Supreme Court has issued ruling after ruling awarding more power to large corporations. This would be the biggest payoff ever to the big businesses, wouldn’t it? I mean, the Republican-controlled Court would have a veto power over all federal regulations?

Dahlia Lithwick: It’s unbelievable. And again, I think it is a pincer when you look at it — twinned with — the issues you’re talking about where, the Chambers of Commerce and big, big corporations have never won the way they’re winning now. Their win rate in the John Roberts court is like nothing we have seen since before the New Deal.

And so I think what you’re seeing is, on the one hand, gutting of unions which this Court has been involved in. Giving huge rights to corporations, whether it’s Citizens United or Hobby Lobby. This slow progression of doing away with workers’ rights and protections for the little guy, protections in all sorts of contexts.

And, at the same time, as you say, the cherry on top is doing away with agency regulations that regulates big businesses. And these big business cases, whether they’re affording huge new rights to businesses, or big wins to businesses that are trying to fight back any attempt to cabin corporate power and union power.

The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the CFPB — any of these agencies — can be just tossed away at the whim of the Court. Those two things together are a huge, huge boon for business, and they are massively costly, not just for workers, but for the environment, and for women’s rights, and for the rights of the elderly. So many entities that are not afforded protections when the Court is only looking out for corporations....

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/everybody-hates-john-roberts/

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Everybody hates John Roberts

THE WASHINGTON MONTHLY

30 JUN 2019

If a successful compromise is one that leaves both sides disappointed, then John Roberts had a banner day on Thursday. Liberals inclined to view the Supreme Court chief justice as a loyal Republican operative saw bitter confirmation in his decision that federal courts have no power to stop partisan gerrymanders. But conservative die-hards who questioned Roberts’s commitment to the movement will shake their heads at his decision to block the Trump administration, at least temporarily, from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census. That’s not to say that the partisan impact of the two rulings will be symmetrical. Roberts, who once famously insisted that his job is “to call balls and strikes,” tends to afford Republican pitchers a wider strike zone. But the pair of rulings gave each side plenty to fume about.

If you don’t believe me, just read Justice Clarence Thomas’s dissent in Department of Commerce v. New York, the census case. The question was whether the U.S. Census Bureau, which is part of the Commerce Department, would be allowed to add a question to the 2020 census asking whether respondents are U.S. citizens or not. While Roberts agreed with the other four conservatives that the answer ordinarily would be yes, he joined the liberal bloc in ruling that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s stated rationale for adding the question—that it was necessary to allow the Department of Justice to protect minority voters—was transparently false. The real reason was that the Census Bureau’s own research showed that a citizenship question would suppress response rates among undocumented immigrants, thereby leading to an undercount in Democratic-leaning areas and further enhancing Republican power after the 2021 round of redistricting.

The proof of this was overwhelming. As Roberts put it in an understated summary:

That evidence showed that the Secretary was determined to reinstate a citizenship question from the time he entered office; instructed his staff to make it happen; waited while Commerce officials explored whether another agency would request census-based citizenship data; subsequently contacted the Attorney General himself to ask if DOJ would make the request; and adopted the Voting Rights Act rationale late in the process.

In short, Roberts concluded, the voting-rights rationale was a pretext. Judges should give government officials the benefit of the doubt, he wrote, but “[a]ccepting contrived reasons would defeat the purpose of” judicial review.

You might think that would be an uncontroversial notion. But all four of Roberts’s conservative colleagues would have allowed the government to go forward with the question. Thomas’s dissent, which was joined by Trump appointees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, was dripping in indignant contempt, all but accusing the majority of discriminating against the Trump administration: “The Court therefore upholds the decision of the District Court—which, in turn, was transparently based on the application of an administration-specific standard.” Later, in a passage that, other than syntactically, would not seem out of place in a Sean Hannity monologue, Thomas added: “I do not deny that a judge predisposed to distrust the Secretary or the administration could arrange those facts on a corkboard and—with a jar of pins and a spool of string—create an eye-catching conspiracy web.”

From the pitch of his outrage, you could almost forget that Thomas and the conservatives claimed victory in the day’s more consequential ruling, on partisan gerrymandering.

There’s nothing inherently conservative about gerrymandering—indeed, Thursday’s case, Rucho v. Common Cause, involved both a Republican gerrymander in North Carolina and a Democratic one in Maryland—but the decision is a boon to Republicans for the simple reason that they currently benefit far more from it. There are, in other words, more North Carolinas than Marylands. When Republicans swept into power in statehouses around the country in 2010, just in time for redistricting, they were armed both with both sophisticated new technology and an unprecedently rigorous plan for deploying it. The result is that in many states, Democrats are effectively locked out of taking back the legislature. In Wisconsin, for example, Democrats won 53 percent of the popular vote last year—and only 36 percent of legislative seats.

In his majority opinion in Rucho, Roberts didn’t deny that partisan gerrymandering is bad for democracy. Rather, he argued, there’s simply no manageable way for federal courts to police it. Since districting decisions made by elected officials will inevitably take political considerations into account, everyone knows some element of partisanship must be allowed. Therefore, Roberts reasoned, striking down a partisan gerrymander would require the Court to answer an unanswerable question: “How much is too much?” As distasteful as gerrymandering is, he concluded, it’s up to the political process (and perhaps state courts), not federal judges, to address the problem.

This line of reasoning drove liberals up the wall. The problem with egregious partisan gerrymandering is precisely that it makes it all but impossible for the disadvantaged side to win back power. To say that it’s up to the North Carolina legislature to undo its gerrymander is to say that the state’s Republicans should voluntarily cede their advantage. The practical upshot of Thursday’s ruling will be to help Republicans (and Democrats, in states like Maryland) hang onto power without actually winning over a majority of voters.

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan excoriated the conservative majority for failing to recognize that lower federal courts have already been converging on a manageable test for identifying excessive partisan gerrymanders, one that looks at whether the purpose and effect of districting is to “substantially” entrench the dominant party in power by diluting the other party’s votes. “But in throwing up its hands,” she wrote, “the majority misses something under its nose: What it says can’t be done has been done.” Liberal commentators have gone farther. Prominent election law scholar Rick Hasen wrote in the New York Times that “the opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts is disingenuous” because the Supreme Court regularly imposes vague-sounding standards like “reasonable” or “substantial” to draw boundaries in other areas of the law.

But while Roberts’s liberal critics have landed some punches, it’s a stretch to treat the gerrymandering ruling as a clear case of bad-faith partisan judging. Drawing the constitutional line between “partisan” and “too partisan” is no easy task. Consider Kagan’s response to Roberts’s question, “How much is too much?” Pointing to the truly extreme level of partisan precision in the North Carolina case, she treated the concern as trivial. “How about the following for a first-cut answer,” she wrote: “This much is too much.” It’s a cute line, but it’s not really an adequate answer. If the Court is to weigh in on these cases, it’s fair to expect it to establish a rule that goes beyond ad hoc judgments.

We may ultimately get a clearer answer to the question of whether Roberts’s ruling was really disingenuous. To show that the democratic process is up to the challenge of curtailing gerrymandering, he cites a litany of reforms, including nonpartisan redistricting commissions, which voters in Michigan and Colorado approved last fall. As it happens, the Court affirmed the constitutionality of such commissions in 2015, in a 5-4 decision with the now-retired Anthony Kennedy joining the liberals. Do you know who wrote the dissent? John Roberts. With Kennedy now replaced by Kavanaugh, it’s a safe bet that there are enough votes to overturn that precedent. But if Roberts chooses that path, it will be yet another blow to the flagging legitimacy of the institution he leads. And that much might really be too much.

Note these 2 cases undermine 2020 election, demo political partisan hacks

also scotus on gerrymander

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/supreme-court-sends-census-citizenship-case-back-to-lower-court-after-bombshell-evidence-reveals-gops-true-motives/

also scotus on gerrymander

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/supreme-court-sends-census-citizenship-case-back-to-lower-court-after-bombshell-evidence-reveals-gops-true-motives/

no lnx

Supreme Court sends census citizenship case back to lower court after bombshell evidence reveals GOP’s true motives

STEPHEN WOLF / DAILY KOS

27 JUN 2019 AT 15:30 ET

In a surprise decision that will help preserve fair political representation, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Trump administration from adding a question to the 2020 census asking U.S. residents about their citizenship status, instead sending the case back to lower court for it to explore explosive new evidence behind the GOP’s motives for including the question.

The addition of this citizenship question would have likely had a chilling effect, intimidating millions of people in immigrant communities into not participating in the census. That in turn would have turbocharged a new wave of hyperpartisan Republican gerrymandering nationwide, since census data is the bedrock of redistricting.

This impact was in fact the entire rationale behind this question: In a recent bombshell report, based on newly unearthed documents from a deceased GOP political consultant, Thomas Hofeller, Republicans admitted that rigging the census would eviscerate the political power of Democrats and voters of color.

The Constitution mandates that every person in the U.S. be counted in the decennial census, without regard to their legal status. A question on citizenship hasn’t been included in the census since 1950, and even when it has appeared, it has never been asked of every single participant, as the Trump administration intended it to be in 2020. Furthermore, multiple lower courts had ruled that Trump’s attempt to add the question violated both federal law and the Constitution.

Those courts uniformly dismissed the Trump administration’s claim that the Justice Department needed data on citizenship to enforce the Voting Rights Act as a bogus pretext that masked their true motives. Hofeller’s document trove revealed the GOP’s racist and partisan intent: allowing mapmakers to use citizenship statistics result in “a disadvantage to the Democrats” and to be “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.”

Although the Census Bureau had planned to print millions of census forms in July, plaintiffs argued that it could delay printing until October to give the courts time to resolve the case. Now, the case will go back to the federal district court in New York that originally heard the matter. That will allow the judge to conduct an in-depth review of the new evidence and craft a ruling that addresses the Trump administration’s racial and partisan animus. In the likely event that the lower court once again blocks the question, the Supreme Court may let such a ruling stand following its latest decision.

Given the blatant display of partisan and racial bigotry behind the GOP’s plans, this ruling averted a major blow to democracy that would have rivaled the harms of both 2000’s Bush v. Gore decision and the 2013 ruling that crippled the Voting Rights Act. Although the Supreme Court’s Republican majority has advanced an increasingly partisan agenda that undermines the rule of law, Trump’s malicious effort to weaponize the census simply proved to be too extreme for the court to accept.

new

‘A requiem for American democracy’: 5-4 Supreme Court vote rules partisan gerrymandering is ‘beyond the reach of the federal courts’

Elizabeth Preza June 27, 2019

The Supreme Court on Thursday in a 5-4 ideological split rejected limits to partisan gerrymandering, quashing an effort by advocates of political reform to rein in manipulative electoral district boundaries

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/justice-neil-gorsuch-says-no-one-can-sue-to-stop-the-government-from-establishing-religion/

kos

Theocrat Gorsuch says no American can challenge a Christian religious display on government property.

One inherent danger of allowing a religious minority to install a puppet controlled by religious fanatics in the White House is the now unfolding threat of government officially establishing religion – the Christian religion. Any American’s confidence that the U.S. Constitution is a protection against government establishing religion is grossly misplaced and, that belief is about to be disabused by the current religious conservatives responsible for adjudicating the law of the land.

Because a nearly half-century-old Supreme Court ruling prevented the government from advancing religion, the wall of separation between church and state is almost certainly going to be eviscerated by the Christian conservatives on the current Supreme Court. The crusade to demolish the wall of separation is being advanced by one of the Heritage Foundation SCOTUS nominees confirmed shortly after Trump corrupted every aspect of the government his tiny little hands touched. However, it is noteworthy that Neil Gorsuch’s theocratic crusade is wholly supported by Trump’s other SCOTUS appointee, religious _{serial}_ _{liar}_ and _{sexual abuser}_ Brett Kavanaugh.

The reason the “_{Establishment}__{ Clause}_” is going to be found unconstitutional by the current Court’s Christian conservatives is crystal clear; they believe a 1970’s-era _{ruling}_ prohibiting government establishment of religion adhered to the U.S. Constitution and is patently wrong. The prohibition on government establishing religion is appalling to evangelicals and the theocrats on the High Court are not going to tolerate it any longer.

The High Court recently heard two cases, _{American Legion v. American Humanist Association}_ and _{Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission v. American Humanist Association}_, brought by Americans who errantly believed the Supreme Court would rule according to the U.S. Constitution like lower federal courts; but that prospect is highly unlikely. Those Americans failed to comprehend that there are few conservatives who actually fulfill their oath to uphold the nation’s founding document and law of the land; this is particularly true any time the Constitution is at odds with the theocracy-minded _{Christian Dominionis}__{ts}_. Christian Dominionists have lusted for the day the federal government will establish the Christian religion as the law of the land, and it is something Justice Neil Gorsuch contends cannot be challenged.

Based on comments by Trump’s more vocal and radical theocratic justice, it is all but certain that the Court will uphold the so-called “_{Peace Cross}_” as the initial step in a long sought-after demolition of the so-called wall of separation enshrined in the U.S. Constitution’s 1st Amendment. The case centers on a 40-foot tall Christian cross-shaped monument on government land in Maryland. The Christian cross, a well-known Christian symbol, was erected to honor fallen Christian soldiers from the First World War; as if no Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, or atheists sacrificed their lives for what they believed was a nation with a secular Constitution banning the government from establishing any religion.

Trump’s theocratic Justice Neil Gorsuch proffered a truly radical position regarding the unconstitutionality of the government establishing religion, as if he was a hired lawyer and spokesman for the theocratic Dominionist movement. Although not going so far as asserting the First Amendment’s “_{Establishment Clause }__{is unconstitutional}_” like former Attorney General J. Beauregard Sessions, he may as well have.

Gorsuch did, in fact, claim that any plaintiffs who challenge government establishment and endorsement of one specific religion should be banned from suing the government to force it to uphold the Constitution’s Establishment Clause. According to Gorsuch, there is no situation that allows any American to have “legalstanding to challenge” a Christian religious display on government property; something that is in fact establishing religion. He claims that because “their only injury is that they take offense” at the religious display on taxpayer’s land, in his theocratic mind being offended is not enough to demand the government abide by the law of the land – any more than expecting Christian conservative justices to support, uphold, and decide cases based on the Constitution.

It is noteworthy that in Gorsuch’s Catholic mind there in no law, no part of the Constitution, or no civil rights protections that an evangelical extremist’s religious freedom cannot abridge. In fact, any time he has been involved with cases regarding basic civil rights, especially women’s and gays’ human rights, Gorsuch plays the religious liberty card – it is what his Catholic religious_{ leaders}_ taught evangelicals a few decades ago as an electoral tool to engender unwavering religious support for Republican candidates in the South.

During the evangelicals’ argument that the Court has to tear down what Founding Father Thomas Jefferson labeled “a _{wall of separation}_ between church and state,” Gorsuch condemned the High Court’s 1971 ruling in Lemon v. Kurtzman. In that particular case, the Supreme Court had to defend, support, and enforce the 1st Amendment’s “Establishment Clause” because malcontent religious freaks opposed the idea of a Constitution that prohibits theocrats from using the government to establish their religion. In that decision the Court ruled correctly.

“The nation’s laws must have a secular legislative purpose and a primary effect that neither advances nor inhibits religion.”

The Court also held that “the nation’s laws cannot foster government entanglement with religion.”

Gorsuch disagrees and complained bitterly about that kind of originalist argument he asserted was too confusing for judges in lower courts leading him to declare:

“It’s time to thank Lemon for its service and send it on its way.”

Gorsuch’s arguments were aligned closely, and likely carefully coordinated, with one of three theocratic attorneys _{arguing in favor}_ of the Peace Cross as a cudgel to tear apart the wall of separation between the Christian church and state. According to “archconservative lawyer” and theocrat Michael Carvin, any law that advances religion should be upheld by the High Court unless it coerces individuals into religious activity.

It is noteworthy that all Americans are already “coerced” into providing _{tens-of-billions of dollars}_ annually in free, tax-exempt welfare to churches, and that is on top of the several billions worth of tax-free faith-based initiative dollars to shove their religion down other Americans’ throats.

There was a time, not so long ago, that the idea of a Supreme Court justice openly arguing that the government has a right to establish religion, and that no citizen has standing to sue to force said government to adhere to the law of the land, would be considered lubridious. However, that was before a fanatical religious minority seized absolute control of the federal government, including the federal judiciary, on the day of Trump’s poorly-attended inauguration. It is curious that religious extremists like Gorsuch and Kavanaugh claim to be devotees of “Constitutional originalist” Antonin Scalia, and yet they are staunch crusaders for violating the Founders’ original intent and support giving other Christian extremists the religious freedom to control all American citizens.

Look, anyone who is remotely aware of world history, especially the bloody and brutal Christian world history, knows full well that these Taliban-ISIS-like fanatics will never stop until they rule with a theocratic iron fist. The _{Handmaid}__{’s}__{ Tale}_ was probably written as fiction, and possibly as a cautionary tale, but the fictional events that led to the overthrow of the democratic United States and creation of the “_{Republic of }__{Gilead}_” are playing out before American citizen’s eyes – and people are still terrified of uttering an unkind word against the religious minority running America. Sadly, the same “who cares” attitude that allowed America to get to this extremely tragic situation will continue unabated until America is Gilead.

The Republicans advancing the Dominionists’ agenda may not comport changing America’s name to Gilead, but they damn sure countenance America’s lurch toward theocracy. Moreover, they will continue unabated providing a vile group of “mean god” evangelicals with all the “religious liberty” they demand to control every aspect of American life. Even more tragic is that their first victims will be mothers, daughters, sisters, girlfriends and wives of the men who claim to love them while remaining silent and therefore complicit.

Gorsuch just handed down the most bloodthirsty and cruel death penalty opinion of the modern era

IAN MILLHISER

she prolly regrets voting for gorsuch now:

https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/supreme-court-heidi-heitkamp-voter-id-tribal-reservations

on Tuesday, the Supreme Court denied an emergency request to reverse an Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that reinstated a set of draconian North Dakota voter ID restrictions — restrictions which disproportionately impact Native Americans living on tribal lands, and which could threaten the re-election of Democratic incument Sen. Heidi Heitkamp.

The denial, issued by Neil Gorsuch, was 6-2, with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan dissenting, and Brett Kavanaugh — who was only just sworn into office after a bitter confirmation fight — not taking part.

North Dakota is unique among states in not having voter registration at all, meaning that voters are confirmed solely by presenting identification that proves their residency. But the new law, enacted by the Republican-controlled state legislature in 2017, places new restrictions on the type of state-issued ID that is acceptable: specifically, North Dakota voters must now present a photo ID card that bears a residential street address.

That could be a serious problem for thousands of Native American voters who live on tribal lands, because many of them do not actually have residential street addresses. The Postal Service does not deliver directly to many tribal reservations, so many state-issued tribal ID cards simply bear a P.O. box, which will not be sufficient under the new law.

A federal district court previously blocked the law from taking effect after Native American groups sued, and North Dakota conducted its primaries without it. But the Eighth Circuit reversed the lower court in September — and with the Supreme Court refusing to intervene, the law will now take effect for the general election.

Native American voters whose tribal ID cards do not show a residential street address will not be completely without options. They may be able to call their local 911 coordinator, register the location of their address, and have a document mailed to them bearing that address, which can then be used to supplement their ID. But early and absentee voting has already started, and the new rules are bound to create mass confusion, potentially causing thousands of people to stay home or bring the wrong identification.

This, indeed, was Ginsburg's main complaint in her dissent. "The risk of voter confusion appears severe here because the injunction against requiring residential-address identification was in force during the primary election and because the Secretary of State’s website announced for months the ID requirements as they existed under that injunction," she wrote. "Reasonable voters may well assume that the IDs allowing them to vote in the primary election would remain valid in the general election. If the Eighth Circuit’s stay is not vacated, the risk of disfranchisement is large."

Heitkamp is already facing a tough election fight against GOP Rep. Kevin Cramer, who currently leads her in all polls. She won in 2012 by a margin of fewer than 3,000 votes, and Native Americans make up a huge portion of her voter base. Absent a broad awareness and organizing campaign to help people obtain the required documents, the court decision could be a disaster for voter turnout.

https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/supreme-court-decides-let-political-extremists-run-wild-key-election-case

U.S. Supreme Court on Monday all-but dismissed one of the most-watched election law cases in recent years, saying those in Wisconsin filing a lawsuit that sought to show how extreme partisan gerrymandering was anti-democratic had no basis to sue.

It also took no action on a second partisan gerrymandering case from Maryland.

“The Court has not found that this presents an individual and personal injury of the kind required for Article III standing,” the majority said in the Wisconsin case, sending it back to a lower court. “A citizen’s interest in the overall composition of the legislature is embodied in his right to vote for his representative. The harm asserted by the plaintiffs in this case is best understood as arising from a burden on their own votes.”

The Wisconsin case sought to show how the state’s GOP-led legislature in 2011 segregated each party’s reliable voters by party to draw legislative districts after the 2010 Census to create a red super-majority. In the Maryland case, those suing said a Democratic-led legislature had overreached to erase a GOP-held House seat.

The Wisconsin suit was the most carefully watched of the two gerrymandering cases, because it involved statewide jockeying of political districts, as opposed to a single congressional seat. It was also the platform for advanced analysis that showed how the use of technology was able to tilt the electoral playing field to game political advantage based on voter turnout patterns.

The decision will reverberate on many political and cultural levels. Seen from a partisan standpoint, the Court is saying that the plaintiffs’ efforts to demonstrate that Wisconsin’s Republican mapmakers were able create a structural head start in the likely popular vote was fair game—even if it led to one-party rule for most of this decade. Beyond the technicalities of how the GOP nullified their opposition’s ability to win in typical election cycles (2018 is not a typical year), the Court’s majority is saying that rebalancing elections to create greater equality among voters is not a constitutional priority.

Going deeper, the Court’s action is likely to signal that ruling parties in supermajority state legislatures are free to tinker with the rules of voting and elections as they see fit—to preserve their power. (Wisconsin was one of more than a dozen red states that drew extreme gerrymandered maps after the 2010 census, leading to super majorities in their state legislatures and House delegations. Those ultra-red majorities then passed many of this decade’s voter suppression, anti-union, anti-abortion, anti-LGBT and anti-safety net laws.

On a cultural level, the Court is signaling that American democracy will remain a deeply uneven system, where governing classes can advantage themselves and take steps to undermine the participation and power of their opponents or under-represented constituencies.While there is a tendency among the judiciary to keep a certain distance from the political process—as a co-equal branch of government and separation of powers—the fact remains that the Court is not seeking to rebalance the most glaring anti-democratic features in the fundamentals that shape the electoral process.

Inequality in elections is going to remain a formidable obstacle. Only last week, in purple North Carolina, did the Republican-led legislature propose anew series of election rules that would disadvantage a key Democratic voting block—African Americans who voted on the weekend before the Tuesday general election. The state’s GOP proposed, among several measures, to eliminate the early voting option used by 200,000 citizens in 2016.

That move came despite a federal appeals court in 2016 rejecting an earlier slate of anti-participatory election reforms, saying those measures targeted the state’s black voters “with almost surgical precision.” But now, with the Supreme Court not acting on the partisan gerrymandering cases, the political process will be freer to revert to more aggressive tactics to advantage one side—where partisan power apparently carries more constitutional weight than equality among the electorate.

for example:

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/supreme-court-gives-republicans-another-tool-rig-elections-voter-purge-decision

Supreme Court dealtyet another blow to voting rights on Monday, this time giving states the go-ahead to purge their voter rolls, a practice that disproportionately targets Democratic-leaning populations and in particular people of color:

The case hinged on interpretation of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), a 1993 civil rights law intended to increase voter registration and participation. But in recent years, some conservative activists began using certain provisions of the law to force states to more aggressively purge their rolls. Those provisions govern what’s known as “list maintenance,” and their stated purpose is to remove people who have moved or passed away. But election officials instead sometimes use list maintenance to remove eligible voters—particularly poor ones and people of color—because they haven’t voted frequently enough. [...]

The court’s 5-4 decision is likely to resurrect an era that the NVRA was meant to end. The practice of purging voters dates back more than 100 years. Just as today, it was justified as a necessary tool to thwart fraud and maintain the integrity of elections. But in practice, it was often used to suppress the votes of those who might not support the party in power. The result of the aggressive purges was that Americans participated in elections at a far lower rate than citizens of other Western democracies. and low election participation rates is just what Republicans want—so Republican-controlled states will doubtless take this anti-democratic Supreme Court decision and run with it, giving Republicans yet another advantage in an increasingly rigged system.

another eg

game over tipping pt?! rbg v gorsuch

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/5/23/supreme_court_deals_blow_to_workers

a major blow to workers’ rights, the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 Monday that employers can use arbitration clauses to prohibit workers from banding together to challenge violations of federal labor laws in class-action lawsuits. Arbitration is often confidential. Many workers may agree to mandatory arbitration clauses without even being aware of it when they sign a contract with their employer. In a rare show of public displeasure, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench, calling the majority opinion “egregiously wrong” and saying, “The court today holds enforceable these arm-twisted, take-it-or-leave-it contracts—including the provisions requiring employees to litigate wage and hours claims only one-by-one. Federal labor law does not countenance such isolation of employees.” For more, we speak with Terri Gerstein, former labor bureau chief for the New York State Attorney General’s Office

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2018/05/22/epic-fail-supreme-court-strips-non-union-workers-power/

no link chart

EPIC FAIL: SUPREME COURT TURNS BACK THE CLOCK TO STRIP WORKERS OF POWER

--eg-

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-right-wing-plan-destroy-unions-and-hinder-democratic-fundraisin

Monday, the Supreme Court heard a major case that will substantially weaken public-sector unions and diminish the strength of the Democratic Party.

That case is Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, which will determine whether public-sector unions can collect fees from non-union employees.

It sounds like a simple and technical issue, but the outcome could change the fate of public-sector unions, the strongest-standing bulwark of labor organizing in a time when many private unions have largely faded.

Unions need to be able to enforce fees on non-members because these employees could otherwise reap the benefits of collective bargaining, such as higher payer, job protection, and good working conditions. Without the power to enforce fees on non-members, unions could be substantially weakened because there would be a strong incentive for employees to free-ride and not pay the fees — ultimately undermining the benefits of collective bargaining.

Opponents say that forcing non-member to pay union fees violates the First Amendment because unions engage in political speech. However, the court already ruled on those arguments in 1977 in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, coming down in favor the unions. There's no reason for the court to take the issue again. Even many conservative legal analysts disagree with that the court should hear Janus.

But the court heard a similar case last year, and it came down 4-4 after Justice Antonin Scalia died. It's widely believed that Scalia would have voted against the unions. Justice Neil Gorsuch is almost certain to follow this path.

As the New York Timesreports, major conservative donors have backed this aggressive legal attack on public sector unions. And it's not just about labor — it's a political attack to weaken the Democratic Party, which draws substantially on public-sector unions for financial and organizational support.

As Eric Segall, a law professor at Georgia State, argues, there's no constitutional basis for the conservative justices to rule against unions and overturn Abood.

"If the Justices were to take their prior rules regarding precedent (and federalism interests) seriously, they would not overturn Abood," Segall writes. "[I]t will demonstrate yet again that the values and politics of the Justices trump their alleged commitments to legal principles and the rule of law. Moreover, if the Justices overturn Abood, it will be because Justice Gorsuch, not Judge Garland, now sits on the Court, not because the first amendment forbids states from making the decision to require all public sector employees to financially support the unions that represent their best interests."

The memo notes that they believe Justice Anthony Kennedy will soon retire, and the effort to replace him will be “far more contentious” than the effort to confirm Justice Neil Gorsuch.

“If President Trump nominates a principled, constructionist nominee for Justice Kennedy’s seat or any other vacant seat, we anticipate engaging with both grassroots and under-the-dome tactics, bringing paid and earned media and events to support the confirmation.” The memo notes that the network sponsored pressure effort on Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D.; and Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., all of whom eventually voted to confirm Gorsuch.

In Indian Wells, California, last month, the network held a retreat with 700 donors. Several journalists were invited to attend as long as they promised not to name the donors present.

Operatives from the network also led sessions to explain how to move forward into the midterm elections. The Koch brothers intend to spend $400 million to preserve the Republican majority in Congress and maintain GOP power at the state level.

In recent days, Koch network groups have purchased ads targeting Democratic lawmakers in key elections across the country. This week, a new ad began airing in Missouri criticizing Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, who is up for re-election this year.

“We’ve made more progress in the last five years than I had in the last 50,” Charles Koch reportedly said. “The capabilities we have now can take us to a whole new level.”

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/supreme-court-just-blocked-order-north-carolina-redraw-gerrymandered-congressional

North Carolinians may vote in the 2018 midterm elections under a congressional map that has been gerrymandered by Republicans. The U.S. Supreme Court has blocked a lower court ruling ordering the U.S. House of Representatives district lines be redrawn by January 24.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor both objected to the order.

Reuters explains the initial ruling that ordered the district lines be redrawn:

"The three-judge panel ruled that the Republican-drawn districts violated the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law by intentionally hobbling the electoral strength of non-Republican voters. Two of the three judges also said the plan ran afoul of the Constitution’s First Amendment by discriminating based on political belief and association."

The Supreme Court is reviewing cases of alleged gerrymandering in Wisconsin and Maryland. The implications of these cases on other states, including North Carolina, remain to be seen.

...

[bold lost?]

tagami suing, could go scotus, ~ local regs (even state?!)

refurbish rotunda bldg; boycott;

kty ($50 mil pledge, montreal guy wants pension for 250) and utah need export term; thin green line ecotpia cascadia oil and coal exports

10 microns, even 2.5 (2x any other rr freight)

ted franklin erin revin sp and __ No coal in Oakland

https://kpfa.org/episode/talkies-december-26-2017/

tagami said no coal, but was talking to kinder secret?

Bowie co

rich lawyers 20 min in; gorsuch and __ want to reverse commerce clause/interstate commerce b/c of pipelines?!

amicus by becerra, cbd, cbe

vs earth justice; could be summary judgment w/o trial jan 10 2018

https://maplight.org/story/tax-returns-identify-dark-money-organization-as-source-of-gop-supreme-court-attacks/

A dark money organization that has spent millions to finance conservative causes was the source of the $17 million spent to keep Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat in Republican hands, tax documents reviewed by MapLight reveal.

The Wellspring Committee, a Virginia-based nonprofit, donated more than $23 million last year to the Judicial Crisis Network, which spent $7 million on advertisements pushing Republican senators to block President Barack Obama’s court pick, Merrick Garland. After the election, the network spent another $10 million to boost President Donald Trump’s pick, Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Wellspring received more than $32 million in donations last year, with $28.5 million coming from a single, anonymous donor. Before 2016, Wellspring had never received more than $13.2 million in annual donations. As a social welfare organization, Wellspring is not required to disclose its donors.

A tax form from the Wellspring Committee shows $28.5 million coming from a single, anonymous donor. Wellspring gave $23.5 million to another dark money organization that spent millions to keep Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat in Republican hands.

JCN and Wellspring share personal ties. Ann Corkery, a Washington lawyer, has served as Wellspring’s president. Her husband, Neil, has been JCN’s treasurer and has apparently succeeded Ann as Wellspring’s president, according to the committee’s tax return; JCN’s most recent tax filing doesn’t mention him.

Last year, Wellspring gave $100,000 to the Federalist Society, a conservative lawyers organization that has emerged as one of the most influential players in Washington during the Trump era. The organization recommended Trump nominate Gorsuch for the Supreme Court, and one of its top executives, Leonard Leo, is reportedly advising the Trump administration on judicial selections. JCN and Wellspring provided almost 80 percent of the money raised by the Rule of Law Project, a conservative nonprofit that listed Leo as a director in tax filings.

JCN has put Wellspring’s money to use in other ways. JCN reported giving $8.5 million in grants to conservative nonprofits and political groups on its latest tax return, covering July 2015 to June 2016. Beneficiaries included the Republican Governors Association and the Republican Attorneys General Association, as well as organizations that supported conservative court justices in Wisconsin and North Carolina

Wellspring also donated $2 million to the American Future Fund, an organization that spent more than $12 million on ads boosting Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., in his presidential and Senate campaigns, during the 2016 election cycle. It gave another $2.5 million to Illinois Policy Action, a dark money organization that supports conservative policies in Illinois.

https://movetoamend.org/gorsuch%E2%80%99s-gory-expansion-corporate-personhood

===

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/neil-gorsuch-reportedly-alienating-his-colleagues-supreme-court-left-and-right

Long after his presidency is over and Trump has finally shuffled off this mortal coil, Neil Gorsuch will likely still be sitting on the Supreme Court, much to the delight of American conservatives. Gorsuch's fellow Supreme Court justices do not appear to share their glee. Multiple reports indicate that almost from the moment he was confirmed, the dyed-in-the-wool constructionist has rubbed members of the court the wrong way—and not just the liberals on the bench.

Last month, Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker cataloged all of the judicial norms and practices the Trump appointee has violated during his brief tenure. He has dominated oral arguments where new associates are expected to defer to their seniors, penned condescending dissents challenging the wisdom of a court whose justices claim more than 140 years of experience between them, and barely concealed his contempt for Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, a landmark decision legalizing same-sex marriage.

Gorsuch has also broken SCOTUS' unwritten rule that no justice embarrass the high court with any kind of overt political advocacy. In less than a year of service, he has delivered speeches at the conservative Fund for American Studies (at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, no less), as well as at the University of Louisville, where he was introduced by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. (McConnell was instrumental in blocking the appointment of Merrick Garland, whom Gorsuch ultimately supplanted.)

"There is nothing unlawful about Gorsuch’s speeches, though it’s hard to say just what the ethical rules are for Supreme Court Justices," Toobin writes. "They are exempt from the code that governs the conduct of other federal judges, so the Court has traditionally relied on informal self-policing."

John Roberts, who was appointed by George W. Bush in 2005, has reportedly taken exception with Antonin Scalia's successor. According to CNN, a "rivalry" has emerged between the two conservatives, with the chief justice refusing to join Gorsuch's dissent in a case overturning an Arkansas law that prohibited same-sex partners from being listed on a child's birth certificate. (Roberts previously dissented in Obergefell.) And while he's been fairly consistent throughout his judicial career, the piece notes, "Roberts may be more open to negotiating with liberals if Gorsuch continues to bolster the hard right."

Gorsuch's relationships with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan appear markedly more contentious. During oral arguments in Gill v. Whitford, a case that could determine the future of partisan gerrymandering in U.S. congressional districts, Ginsburg appeared to bristle at the associate justice's originalist line of questioning, asking him curtly, "Where did one person/one vote come from?"—a reference to Chief Justice Earl Warren's ruling in 1964's Reynolds v. Sims.

Earlier this week, NPR's Nina Totenberg, who has covered the court for decades, told the Supreme Court podcast First Mondays that Kagan has "really taken him on" in conference. "It’s [been] a pretty tough battle," she said, "and it’s going to get tougher."

"Why is Totenberg’s reporting here so extraordinary?" asks Mark Joseph Stern of Slate. "Because it’s astonishing that any reporter would hear details from conference, let alone score some genuinely juicy scuttlebutt...If rumors leak about a justice’s behavior in conference—and they basically never do—it is almost certainly a justice who leaked them. And when justices leak—which again, happens very rarely—they do so on purpose."

Gorsuch is an illegitimate justice occupying a stolen Supreme Court seat. If he leaves behind a legacy of corporate plunder and institutional rot, he will have honored the man who nominated him.

===

Gorsuch’s Gory Expansion of Corporate Personhood

March 22, 2017

Greg Coleridge

Programs on Corporations, Law & Democracy

Supreme Court Justice nominee Neil Gorsuch didn’t invent “corporate personhood,” the shorthand term used to describe the ludicrous decisions by U.S. Supreme Courts to sanctify corporate entities with inalienable constitutional rights intended exclusively for human beings.

As a federal judge, however, Gorsuch contributed to its expansion by applying it in creatively delusional ways in Burwell v. HobbyLobby^1. That 2014 case established that a “closely held”^2 for-profit corporation, apart from the human beings connected to it, possesses religious rights.

Corporations were originally subordinate to We the People

Supreme Court Justices began more than a century ago twisting existing constitutional doctrines into a pretzel to justify with straight faces that, indeed, legal documents issued by the federal and individual state governments possessed constitutional rights.

As followers of the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy (POCLAD) are well aware, corporate entities were not intended originally at the nation’s founding to possess inalienable constitutional rights. They were granted charters, or licenses, one at a time by We the People via legislatures that precisely defined their actions. These included, among many others, limited charter durations and purposes, limits on the amount of land ownership, and stipulations of who could be corporate directors

Corporate charters were deemed to be democratic tools wielded to ensure public authority and control over subordinate corporate creations by the public. The corporate charter conferred “privileges,” not “rights.” Corporations were designed to be publicly accountable. If a corporation violated the democratically determined terms of its charter, state legislators or courts often revoked its charter with its assets distributed to those negatively impacted.

In a 1900 ruling to revoke the charter of a dairy corporation, the Ohio Supreme Court stated:

The time has not yet arrived when the created is greater than the creator, and it still remains the duty of the courts to perform their office in the enforcement of the laws, no matter how ingenious the pretexts for their violation may be, nor the power of the violators in the commercial world. In the present case the acts of the defendant have been persistent, defiant and flagrant, and no other course is left to the court than to enter a judgment of ouster and to appoint trustees to wind up the business of the concern.^3

The role of a corporation was to provide useful goods or services. It wasn’t to lobby, contribute or invest in political campaigns, or even to engage in charitable activities.

Corporations become legal “persons”

All this changed when corporate agents began effectively influencing state legislatures and in the appointment of corporate attorneys to the Supreme Court. Corporations escaped democratic controls by influencing legislatures to adopt general incorporation laws (vs one at a time charters); and by shifting corporate decision making from:

The state to federal level,
Legislatures to regulatory agencies, and,
The legislative and executive branches to the judiciary (i.e. courts, including the Supreme Court).

It didn’t take long for corporate lawyers to appeal decisions limiting corporate actions to their peers on the Supreme Court, which ending up finding corporations as legal persons in a wide number of unforeseen places in the constitution. These included within the 1^th Amendment (right to speak and right not to speak), 4^thAmendment (right against search and seizure), 5^th Amendment (right against “takings”) and 14^th Amendment (right of due process and equal protection). Corporate attorneys also hijacked the Contracts and Commerce clauses, which became anti-democratic battering rams.

Scores of federal court decisions over the last century have widened and deepened corporate constitutional rights. These decisions overturned local, state and federal laws that had previously protected workers, consumers, communities and the environment. By doing so, corporations increased political and economic power at the expense of individuals without wealth and the keys to the corporate boardroom.

As evident from this brief historical account and despite what many believe, the 2010 Citizens United vsFEC^4 Supreme Court decision didn’t initiate the anointment of inalienable constitutional rights to corporate entities. The controversial 5-4 split decision by the Supremes merely widened the already existing 1^st Amendment free speech rights of corporate entities to make political donations (or investments) in elections.

Gorsuch further expands “corporate personhood”

While serving on the 10^th Circuit Court of Appeals, Neil Gorsuch played a prominent role in further widening and deepening constitutional rights to corporate entities, specifically for-profit corporations, into an entirely new arena: religion. He was among the majority who ruled in the Hobby Lobby case that federal law prohibited the Department of Health and Human Services from requiring closely held, for-profit secular corporations to provide contraceptive coverage as part of their employer-sponsored health insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act if it violated the corporation’s religious beliefs.

You read it right: the corporation’s “religious rights.” The U.S. Supreme Court upon appeal affirmed the decision in a controversial 5-4 split decision.

Hobby Lobby’s owners claimed they shouldn’t have had to be forced to comply with federal laws that violated their personal religious convictions. They referenced the 1993 federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which prohibits the government from imposing a "substantial burden" on a person's exercise of religion, even in a generally enforced law.

Just to be clear about the decision: Gorsuch and others didn’t just rule that Hobby Lobby’s owners had constitutionally-protected religious beliefs, but that the artificial legal creation of the state itself, Hobby Lobby Incorporated, possessed religious convictions.

To extend and pretend that private, personal religious rights apply to public entities such as business corporations is a breach of a constitutional firewall with potential lethal discriminatory implications. Dissenting in the case, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, "[ t ]he exercise of religion is characteristic of natural persons, not artificial legal entities," the ruling was “a decision of startling breadth.” and "[ t ]he court...has ventured into a minefield."^5

The Hobby Lobby case opens the door as never before to requests for exemptions by private business corporations to laws that apply to all of us based on any number of claimed religious beliefs. Some individuals, for example, currently hold strong religious convictions about everything from racial, religious and sexual-orientation discrimination to the role of women in society. Hiring, paying, treating and providing benefits to employees are potentially up for grabs. Providing service (or not) to customers based on any number of factors is potentially at the whim of certain businesses. Even specific for-profit charter schools could impose religiously motivated racial segregation policies on their students.

What existing or potential civil rights laws would not be impotent to claims where the discrimination by a business corporation was motivated by strongly held religious beliefs of its owners? Thanks to Hobby Lobby, the corporation provides the cover for individuals to impose racism, sexism, homophobia and classism. Those wishing to discriminate toward others were handed a powerful weapon in the Hobby Lobby decision.

This isn’t just fantasy. It’s already happening. A federal district judge last year ruled that a transgender employee could be fired by a funeral home because its owner believed that gender transition violated his biblical teachings^6.

Ending corporate personhood

seattle times

How his mother’s downfall as Reagan’s EPA chief affected Court nominee Gorsuch

Originally published February 4, 2017 at 3:24 pm Updated February 4, 2017 at 4:38 pm

Former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Anne Gorsuch Burford, with husband, Robert, gestures at farewell news conference in Washington in 1983. (IRA SCHWARZ/AP)

Judge Neil Gorsuch is no stranger to political infighting. His mother was criticized for spending cuts and easing rules as head of the EPA, eventually resigning after Congress cited her for contempt for refusing to turn over documents related to a toxic-waste program.

By ADAM LIPTAK, PETER BAKER, NICHOLAS FANDOS and JULIE TURKEWITZ

The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Judge Neil Gorsuch’s first taste of rough-and-tumble Washington, D.C., politics was bitter and lingering.

He was 15 and his mother was a high-ranking official in the Reagan administration caught in an ugly showdown with Congress. When she was forced to step down, her reputation in tatters, young Neil was furious.

“You should never have resigned,” he told his mother, Anne Gorsuch Burford, by her later account. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You only did what the president ordered. Why are you quitting? You raised me not to be a quitter. Why are you a quitter?”

More than three decades later, Neil Gorsuch, a federal appeals court judge in Denver, has been nominated to the Supreme Court by President Trump and faces a political culture even more caustic than the one that destroyed his mother’s public career. Like her, he is a committed conservative and can expect strong opposition, but where she was bold and brash, he has advanced to the pinnacle of the judiciary with understatement and polish.

Now 49, he arrives at his own moment of testing as a child of the Reagan revolution who saw up close the promise and the perils. He inherited a frontier skepticism of government rooted in his home of Colorado and nurtured in Washington, D.C., during the 1980s. While studying at the liberal enclaves of Columbia and Harvard, he rebelled against the dominant thinking to develop a conservative philosophy that has propelled him to the threshold of the Supreme Court.

Despite the family ordeal, friends and relatives said, he emerged from his youth tempered about politics yet not soured on public service. He decided to pursue goals similar to his mother’s, but along a different path.

Burford, known as Anne Gorsuch until she remarried in 1983, was the first woman to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). She argued that states were better custodians of resources and that market forces would bring more discipline to regulation. As she cut spending and pared back rules, critics called her an enemy of the environment. Her downfall came when, at White House direction, she refused to turn over documents related to a toxic-waste program. Congress cited her for contempt.

“It was an example to him of what the realpolitik of Washington could be like,” said Richard Segal, a Harvard Law School classmate who is a lawyer in San Diego. “He viewed his mother as an environmentalist, and his mother viewed herself as an environmentalist. And meanwhile she was made the poster child of the view that the Reagan administration was just out there to rape the environment.”

The teenager was his mother’s conscience. “Neil knew from the beginning the seriousness of my problems,” she wrote in a memoir before her death in 2004. He was “smart as a whip” and “had an unerring sense of fairness, as do many people his age.” When she resigned, “he was really upset.”

By most accounts, he did not dwell on it later in life, but it clearly echoed in his work. In preparing a moot court brief at Harvard on workplace safety, he tried to add material concerning the EPA that did not fit, recalled a classmate, Ellen Bublick, who is now a law professor at the University of Arizona. In his time as an appeals court judge in Denver, his most notable writings have concerned the power of government regulators.

“We talked about that prior history in relation to that,” Bublick said. “He definitely was proud of his mom and had a sense that in the Reagan era certain people took a fall for him in order to protect him. And I think that was really his view of what happened to his mom.”

Rugged individualism

Neil McGill Gorsuch’s earliest years were spent in the West, where at Rocky Mountain campsites and fishing streams he internalized a faith in rugged individualism.

He grew up in a three-bedroom ranch-style house in the east Denver neighborhood. of Hilltop. His parents, Anne and David Gorsuch, were lawyers who had three children: Neil in 1967, Stephanie in 1969 and J.J. in 1973. His mother raised them Roman Catholic; his father was not religious. (Neil Gorsuch is now Episcopalian, according to his brother, possibly inspired by his time studying at Oxford University.)

Studious but not standoffish, Neil shared a bedroom with his brother and attended Christ the King, a Roman Catholic school. Relatives and friends recalled him lugging stacks of books and once rounding the baseball diamond in well-worn cowboy boots after leaving his athletic shoes at home. “If anybody was going to be the president, it was going to be Neil Gorsuch,” said Gina Carbone, 49, a classmate.

In 1976, Anne Gorsuch was elected to the state Legislature, often aligning herself with a small but powerful group of conservatives, dubbed the “House Crazies,” who were determined to cut taxes and loosen regulations. Women’s groups supported her campaign, but in office she led a fight to kill the Colorado State Commission on Women. Fervently anti-abortion rights, she was, one politician told The Washington Post in 1983, “almost paranoid about any kind of abortion legislation.”

She rose quickly. “She was very prominent in the shaping of policy,” said Steve Durham, a leader of the House Crazies. She had a “knack and ability to get along with people and put them at ease.” She also was famously tough. The Rocky Mountain News wrote that she “could kick a bear to death with her bare feet.”

After two terms, Anne Gorsuch became one of three Coloradans to take prominent posts in the Reagan administration, along with James Watt, the interior secretary, and Robert Burford, director of the Bureau of Land Management. Dubbed the “Colorado mafia,” they managed the nation’s natural resources with a fierce belief that the government had gone too far in regulating private enterprise. It was widely believed that they had the backing of Joseph Coors, the conservative Colorado beer magnate.

By the time Anne Gorsuch moved to Washington, D.C., in 1981, she was headed for a divorce, and the children toggled between the capital and Colorado.

Acting the part

Neil Gorsuch soon had a stepfather when his mother married Robert Burford, whom his mother had met in the state Legislature.

Known for wearing furs and smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, Anne Gorsuch Burford became a prominent face of the new administration as she cut back lawsuits against polluters and tried to relax parts of the Clean Air Act.

“There was obviously a lot of controversy regarding her work as she was carrying out the president’s program,” Ed Meese, a top Reagan adviser, recalled. “I’m sure that undoubtedly had an impact on her son.”

J.J. Gorsuch, 43, now a vice president of a Denver marketing-technology company, said his mother’s political life had shaped the family psyche but ultimately made his brother stronger. “If anything, it probably prepared him for the experience ahead in a great way,” he said. “He knows better than most how ugly the political process might get. So in that sense it’s hopefully prepared him for the nomination process.”

A dissenting voice

Gorsuch arrived at Columbia in 1985 as the historically liberal university was recovering from student protests the previous spring and beginning to divest from corporations operating in South Africa. In three years on campus — he graduated a year early — he emerged as the intellectual leader of a resurgent right. It was “a happy band of dissenters,” as Brian Domitrovic, a classmate and fellow conservative, put it.

His eloquence impressed many. That he was tall, clean cut and handsome only helped. He danced and drank Manhattans and martinis, Domitrovic said. He joined Phi Gamma Delta, a fraternity with a reputation for partying, and quietly attended religious services.

But principally, Gorsuch became known as a fierce and lucid writer in the Columbia Daily Spectator, where he published columns, and later The Federalist Paper, which he helped found. Part newspaper, part opinion journal, The Federalist Paper drew comparisons to the conservative Dartmouth Review.

In March 1987, as students debated the fraternity system’s treatment of women and minorities, Gorsuch co-wrote a piece defending all-male clubs. In a familiar rhetorical move, he reframed the issue as free speech. In their “heavy handed moralism,” he wrote, the system’s critics missed “the fact that Columbia is a pluralistic university, that its fraternity is equally pluralistic, with options available for everyone.”

That spring, as students boycotted Coors beer in a labor dispute, posters on campus alleged that The Federalist Paper, which accepted the company’s advertising, had received funding from the conservative Heritage Foundation, financed by the Coors family. Gorsuch mocked the “professional protesters” who had created the posters, and he threatened a libel suit.

“He had a real regal way of writing about this stuff that made us look small,” said Tom Kamber, a leader of the liberals. “His role was really to write these screeds that would try to take the winds out of our sails.”

An optimistic time

The battle continued at Harvard Law School, where Gorsuch arrived in 1988 along with a young man from Chicago named Barack Obama. The two did not intersect much — Obama was six years older — but they mirrored each other as intellectual leaders who managed to disagree without being disagreeable. “Neil was not quite as public a person as Barack was, but at the same time, for the people who knew him, he was very well-respected,” said classmate Segal.

Gorsuch befriended liberals, including Norm Eisen, later a White House aide and ambassador under Obama. “He stood out among the conservative group in not being loud,” Eisen said. “He managed to stay above that while making his conservative positions clear. I thought it was impressive.”

Through all of this, Gorsuch made little mention of his famous mother. Indeed, one friend who stayed close after law school said he had realized the relationship only years later. Once when a fellow student said something disparaging about her on the assumption that he was not related, he brushed it off.

“He deflected it in a very classy way that made me think it was not the first time somebody had said something like that,” Eisen said.

http://www.ecowatch.com/nuclear-option-gorsuch-2347867635.html

Senate Republicans Rig System, Trigger 'Nuclear Option' to Push Through Gorsuch

Senate Republicans rushed through a confirmation vote Thursday on President Donald Trump's nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. Judge Neil Gorsuch has been met with widespread criticism both across the country and from the Senate before, during and after his confirmation process.

For more than 200 years, the Senate has honored a 60 vote margin for Supreme Court nominees to be confirmed. Gorsuch only received 55. According to existing Senate procedure, Gorsuch's nomination would be defeated and the Senate would move forward without confirming him to the court. Instead, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell changed the rules and triggered the so-called "nuclear option" for what had been deemed the "greatest deliberative body" to force Gorsuch's nomination through.

The Senate rightfully rejected Judge Neil Gorsuch's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. It is their duty to advise and consent on judicial nominees and with this vote, they refused their consent and advised President Donald Trump that Gorsuch is not fit to be granted a lifetime appointment to America's highest court..

gorsuch hobby lobby

https://movetoamend.org/gorsuch%E2%80%99s-gory-expansion-corporate-personhood

huffpo

...The latest Democrats to join the fight include Bill Nelson of Florida, who expressed “real concerns” Gorsuch would be hostile to voting rights, sympathetic to efforts to lift campaign finance restrictions and support businesses over workers and consumers.

The other three Democrats to have newly announced their opposition were Judiciary Committee members Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and Al Franken of Minnesota, as well as Jack Reed of Rhode Island.

Democrat Patrick Leahy of Vermont, a member of the Judiciary Committee that held confirmation hearings last week, said he generally opposes filibusters but added that Gorsuch would face such a move if he does not adequately answer written questions.

“An attempted filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee is rare, and to do so in this context, with such an eminently qualified and brilliant judge, is nothing short of obstructionism,” White House spokesman Sean Spicer said, noting Leahy’s comments against taking part in a filibuster.

“He deserves a fair, up-or-down vote,” Spicer added.

The committee is due to vote next Monday on sending the nomination to the full Senate.

Nelson is one of 10 Democrats who conservative activists had hoped would join Republicans in preventing any attempt to block a Gorsuch vote. They are all up for re-election in 2018 in states Trump won in the 2016 presidential election.

Of those, four have now said they would support a filibuster. Aside from Nelson, the others were Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey and Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin.

Domain Name: confirmgorsuch.com

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NRA Freedom Action Foundation buys TV ads to tout guns ahead of Supreme Court hearing

Anita Kumar, McClatchy DC, 3/13/17

Days before Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation hearings are set to begin, the National Rifle Association Freedom Action Foundation will air TV ads across the nation to highlight the importance of the Supreme Court’s makeup to gun rights. “Four Supreme Court justices believe you have the right to defend yourselves with a gun. Four do not,” the narrator in the ad begins. “The men and women of the NRA will not let anti-gun elites strip away our rights or our freedom.” The nearly $1 million ad buy will air across the nation on broadcast, cable and satellite. The ad, provided to McClatchy, will run Tuesday through March 22. Gorsuch’s hearings start March 20. …

“The Supreme Court played a pivotal role in affirming our Second Amendment rights in its historic Heller and McDonald decisions,” said Chris W. Cox, president of the NRA Freedom Action Foundation. “But it’s critical for Americans to remember that their basic right to keep a gun in their homes for self-defense survived at the court by only one vote. This ad campaign highlights that important reality.”

https://www.publicintegrity.org/news/NRA%E2%80%99s-Freedom-Action-Foundation

apr 2012 GOTV

...

These outside allied drives are intended to complement voter mobilization operations by the national party committees and the presidential campaigns where Obama and the Democrats have an early money and infrastructure edge.

Plainly, both sides are aiming for a big turnout this fall.

“This election is going to be won on the ground,” saidChris Cox, the top lobbyist for NRA which has recently launched what appears to be its biggest registration drive ever with a multimillion-dollar price tag. “There are millions of gun owners who aren’t registered,” Cox said, noting that about 100 million Americans own guns.

“We’ll go door to door to do voter registration, education and outreach,” said Cox in describing how the NRA is mounting its “Trigger the Vote” drive. The NRA, whose vaunted grassroots clout is based on its 4 million members, has hired about two dozen “campaign field representatives” who are helping coordinate drives in over a dozen battleground states including Florida, Ohio and Virginia, Cox said.

The NRA registration drive will “work gun shows and retailers” and includes a six-figure television advertising blitz that it launched in February, Cox added. “Voter registration is a very expensive and difficult undertaking.”

Most of the voter registration funding comes from the NRA’s Freedom Action Foundation, a nonprofit arm that doesn’t have to disclose its donors,Cox said. The Center has reported that one prominent foundation donor is Texas energy magnate Clayton Williams, who last year boasted at a Houston luncheon that drew top NRA officials, that he gave $1 million to the foundation in 2010 and intended to do so again in 2012.

Three GOP lobbyists familiar with the expanded NRA registration and mobilization operations this year say that some sizable funds are expected to come from other conservative groups — or possibly major donors such as the billionaire Koch brothers — which are trying to share their largesse with allies with effective grassroots operations.

Cox declined to comment about funding for the NRA foundation, except to say that it mainly comes from small donors.

Likewise, other conservative stalwarts are trying to recoup their political fortunes from the 2008 elections.

Ralph Reed, who is trying to emerge from the cloud he was under because of his close ties to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, said that his Faith and Freedom Coalition has chapters in 30 states and boasts some 500,000 members — of which 185,000 have made donations.

Reed said coalition chapters in key states such as Florida, Virginia and Wisconsin have begun registration efforts. The coalition will also buy ads and and focus on “earned media” in about 20 states where there are important multiple contests—presidential, congressional and gubernatorial — Reed said.

The conservative coalition, which reported in tax forms that it raised more than $5 million in 2010, hopes to spend about twice that amount this year with the bulk targeted for registration and get out the vote drives, Reed said.

To facilitate various conservative get-out-the-vote drives, two multimillion dollar data banks (one of which is reportedly bankrolled by the Kochs) filled with voter information have been assembled.

The more robust spending on voter mobilization work by the right is generating buzz among GOP operatives, some of whom attend periodic meetings hosted by American Crossroads. Crossroads and many other super PACs, both conservative and liberal, were spawned by court rulings in 2010 that gave the green light for corporations, unions and individuals to write unlimited checks for ads and other electoral drives that directly back or oppose candidates.

Crossroads President Steven Law has told the Center that it spent about $10 million in 2010 on voter mobilization operations. Some GOP consultants expect it will do more this cycle given that the super PAC and its nonprofit affiliate are aiming to raise $300 million — more than quadruple the $71 million that the two groups corralled in 2010. Jonathan Collegio, a Crossroads spokesman, said the groups “will be engaged” again in voter mobilization, but that it won’t be a “core function.”

Meanwhile, it’s expected that labor’s ground operations which have been energized this year by big battles in Ohio and Wisconsin against GOP led attempts to curtail public unions, could be more formidable.

...

ref

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/us/politics/neil-gorsuch-supreme-court.html

The publicity-shy billionaire Philip F. Anschutz inherited an oil and gas firm and built it into an empire that has sprawled into telecommunications, railroads, real estate, resorts, sports teams, stadiums, movies and conservative publications like The Weekly Standard and The Washington Examiner.

Mr. Anschutz’s influence is especially felt in his home state of Colorado, where years ago Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, a Denver native, the son of a well-known Colorado Republican and now President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, was drawn into his orbit.

As a lawyer at a Washington law firm in the early 2000s, Judge Gorsuch represented Mr. Anschutz, his companies and lower-ranking business executives as an outside counsel. In 2006, Mr. Anschutz successfully lobbied Colorado’s lone Republican senator and the Bush administration to nominate Judge Gorsuch to the federal appeals court. And since joining the court, Judge Gorsuch has been a semiregular speaker at the mogul’s annual dove-hunting retreats for the wealthy and politically prominent at his 60-square-mile Eagles Nest Ranch.

“They say a country’s prosperity depends on three things: sound money, private property and the rule of law,” Judge Gorsuch said at the 2010 retreat, according to his speaker notes from that year. “This crowd hardly needs to hear from me about the first two of the problems we face on those scores.”

With the Senate Judiciary Committee set to take up Judge Gorsuch’s nomination next week, Democrats have based much of their criticism of him on the argument that his judicial and economic philosophy unduly favors corporations and the wealthy. But his relationship with Mr. Anschutz, 77, whose fortune is estimated by Forbes to be $12.6 billion, has received scant attention.

Democrats’ Line of Attack on Gorsuch: No Friend of the Little Guy MARCH 13, 2017

In Judge Neil Gorsuch, an Echo of Scalia in Philosophy and Style JAN. 31, 2017

In Fall of Gorsuch’s Mother, a Painful Lesson in Politicking FEB. 4, 2017

U.S. Court Rules Against Tax Deferral Strategy JULY 23, 2010

New Owner for Weekly Standard as Political Tastes Change AUG. 2, 2009

The Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, which developed the list of potential Supreme Court nominees from which Mr. Trump selected Judge Gorsuch, receive funding from Mr. Anschutz. But it is not clear how well the two know each other, in part because the mogul and those around him keep a low profile.

When a reporter called Mr. Anschutz’s company and asked for a press officer, a woman who answered said, “We do not respond to media requests.” She hung up when asked her name.

But he has connections with others who work with the Colorado billionaire. For nearly a dozen years, Judge Gorsuch has been partners in a limited-liability company with two of Mr. Anschutz’s top lieutenants. Together, they own a 40-acre property on the Colorado River in the mountains northwest of Denver, where they built a vacation home together.

Judge Gorsuch began representing Mr. Anschutz and his companies when he was working for the Washington law firm then known as Kellogg Huber. Mark Hansen, a senior partner at the firm, said he assigned the future judge, then a junior partner, to help on various cases involving the Anschutz Company “both because of his skills and experience and because he had expressed to me an interest in getting involved in things relating to his home state.”

A 2004 case was typical. A teachers’ retirement fund that owned shares in the Regal Entertainment theater chain sued over its decision to issue a debt-financed dividend that would permit Mr. Anschutz, who owned 58 percent of the company, to extract $368 million. The plaintiffs said this amounted to self-dealing.

Judge Gorsuch helped win a ruling in Regal’s favor by arguing that it could handle the extra debt, telling a judge, “This company is what some analysts call a cash cow.”

Another set of shareholder lawsuits in which Mr. Gorsuch represented Mr. Anschutz involved Qwest Communications International, whose stock price had collapsed amid an accounting fraud scandal after Mr. Anschutz, a Qwest board member, had sold off a large stake. Mr. Hansen said a judge dismissed Mr. Anschutz from the case, although Qwest paid a settlement.

In 2005, Judge Gorsuch left private practice to work at the Justice Department. But soon afterward, a seat on the federal appeals court in Denver became vacant, and Mr. Anschutz sought to secure it for him.

The billionaire Philip F. Anschutz helps fund the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, which developed the list of potential nominees from which President Trump selected Judge Gorsuch.

In January 2006, a top lawyer for Mr. Anschutz sent a letter on the billionaire’s behalf to President George W. Bush’s White House counsel, Harriet E. Miers, suggesting that he nominate Judge Gorsuch. The letter said Mr. Anschutz had spoken to Colorado’s only Republican senator at the time, Wayne Allard, about his idea.

“I have had the pleasure of knowing Mr. Gorsuch for several years, as we worked closely together on several complex federal cases,” wrote the lawyer, Bruce Black, who is now the executive vice president and general counsel of the Anschutz Company. “I have found Mr. Gorsuch to be an exceptionally talented lawyer.”

When he was named to the appeals court, Judge Gorsuch sought to recuse himself from numerous Anschutz-related cases “because my former client” was involved, according to a list he submitted to the Senate.

In 2007 he did participate in a case involving a firm that had merged with Qwest. The disability fund of the old firm, not Qwest, was named as the defendant, although the opinion, written by another judge, noted the old firm was “now Qwest.”

Liz Johnson, a spokeswoman for Judge Gorsuch, portrayed his participation in that Anschutz-linked case as inadvertent, explaining that he did not include the old firm’s name in a recusal list he filed with the court clerk because “it did not exist as an independent company” when he became a judge.

Steven Lubet, a Northwestern University law professor who has written about judicial ethics and recusals, said that so long as Judge Gorsuch disqualifies himself on a case-by-case basis from Supreme Court cases that are too involved with Mr. Anschutz’s interests, his ties to the billionaire should not be a problem.

But the judge appears to be leaving the door open to participating in Anschutz-related cases on the Supreme Court.

Ms. Johnson said his recusal practices at the appeals court went further than what is required on the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court’s procedure is that individual justices decide for themselves whether any particular case meets a vague standard for recusal set by a 1974 statute. It does not address whether cases involving former clients raise an improper appearance of a conflict of interest.

James Sample, a Hofstra University law professor who has studied Supreme Court recusals, said, “It’s very reasonable to ask a Supreme Court nominee for a more thorough answer” about how he will weigh such decisions, especially since “it seems as though there is a kind of continuous relationship — this is not just a past client.”

One of the Anschutz executives Judge Gorsuch represented in a Qwest lawsuit was Cannon Harvey, the head of the venture capital investment arm of Mr. Anschutz’s empire. In 2005, a company called the Walden Group filed paperwork with the Colorado secretary of state that listed Mr. Harvey as the company’s registered agent, but did not disclose any other partners’ identities.

But when he was nominated for the appeals court, Judge Gorsuch disclosed in his Senate questionnaire that he was a partner, too. The Walden Group attracted little attention until his nomination to the Supreme Court, when American Bridge, a liberal research group, identified public records about it that linked Judge Gorsuch to Mr. Harvey.

Days after its formation, the Walden Group purchased a 40-acre property along the Colorado River’s headwaters in the mountains northwest of Denver. The group then built a 2,923-square-foot log house there overlooking “the quiet seclusion of the private fishery,” including both sides of 2,000 feet of the river, according to a real estate listing.

Ms. Johnson said the Walden Group has three partners: Judge Gorsuch, Mr. Harvey and Kevin Conwick. The judge befriended Mr. Harvey while representing Anschutz companies, and Mr. Conwick was a friend of the judge’s late father, a Denver lawyer, she said.

Mr. Conwick is also another important member of Mr. Anschutz’s network. His law firm profile focuses on his work through the years as the billionaire’s counsel in deals to buy sports teams and develop stadium and entertainment district projects, like the Staples Center in Los Angeles.

The Walden Group, including Judge Gorsuch, purchased a 40-acre property along the Colorado River’s headwaters in the mountains northwest of Denver. Credit Julie Turkewitz/The New York Times

Ms. Johnson said Judge Gorsuch contributed $360,000 to the Walden Group, giving him a 20 percent stake; Mr. Harvey and Mr. Conwick each own 40 percent. She said the partners divide the time when each has a right to vacation on the river property, as well as taxes and utilities, based on their respective shares.

Although the judge’s stake is smaller than his partners’, county records direct correspondence about the property to him at the federal courthouse in Denver.

A longtime friend of Judge Gorsuch’s whom Ms. Johnson made available to discuss the property said the partnership had its origin years ago, when Judge Gorsuch’s father and a dozen friends — including Mr. Conwick — bought an adjoining property to be a timeshare they called the Walden Hollow Fishing Club. When the 40-acre property became available, the judge persuaded Mr. Harvey and Mr. Conwick to partner with him to buy it for a similar timeshare, the friend said.

Mr. Conwick and Mr. Harvey declined to discuss the partnership, but since 2015, the Walden Group has been trying to sell the property, and few neighbors know who owns it.

“They’re very protective of their fishing,” said Dawn Murphy, 46, who said she was one of only a few year-round residents nearby.

But down the gravel road from Ms. Murphy’s cabin, a man outside a ranch house identified himself as the river property’s caretaker.

“I’m one of maybe half a dozen people in this valley who know of Neil Gorsuch,” he said.

Then, emphasizing that he was a former law enforcement official, he asked a reporter to leave.

daILY MAIL UK

...Gorsuch founded the ‘Fascism Forever Club’ during his freshman year at Georgetown Preparatory, a now-$30,000-a-year private Jesuit school that is one of the most selective in the United States

Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch makes the rounds in D.C.

The yearbook described the ‘Fascism Forever Club’ as an anti-faculty student group that battled against the 'liberal' views of the school administration.

‘In political circles, our tireless President Gorsuch’s “Fascism Forever Club” happily jerked its knees against the increasingly “left-wing” tendencies of the faculty,’ said the yearbook.

It is not the only example of Gorsuch’s early conservative political views. One yearbook photo showed the high school senior kicking back in a chair in a button-down shirt and tie while reading William F. Buckley’s 1959 book ‘Up from Liberalism', a key text of the conservative movement.

Another photo shows Gorsuch leaning over a railing with his tie undone while sticking his tongue out at the camera.

The new Supreme Court pick (seen with Trump after his nomination was announced on Monday) served as president until he graduated in 1985, according to his senior yearbook

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The new Supreme Court pick (seen with Trump after his nomination was announced on Monday) served as president until he graduated in 1985, according to his senior yearbook

Second reference: While some friends claimed it was Gorsuch's own joke, others said it was made by yearbook editors. It did however appear in another section of the yearbook - with no suggestion it was in any way a joke

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The club was set up to rally against the ‘left-wing tendencies’ of his professors while attending a Jesuit all-boys preparatory high school near Washington D.C.

Georgetown Preparatory is one of the top all-boys prep schools in the United States. This archive shot shows Gorsuch (bottom row on the right) as part of a six-boy pyramid

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Georgetown Preparatory is one of the top all-boys prep schools in the United States. This archive shot shows Gorsuch (bottom row on the right) as part of a six-boy pyramid

Justice in the making: Another photo shows Gorsuch leaning over a railing with his tie undone while sticking his tongue out at the camera

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Justice in the making: Another photo shows Gorsuch leaning over a railing with his tie undone while sticking his tongue out at the camera

At 49 years old, Gorsuch (pictured left in an archive shot) would be the youngest nominee to the Supreme Court in 25 years. He currently lives in Boulder, Colorado with his wife

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At 49 years old, Gorsuch (pictured left in an archive shot) would be the youngest nominee to the Supreme Court in 25 years. He currently lives in Boulder, Colorado with his wife

Gorsuch was the editor and founder of The Federalist Paper at Columbia University, where he chose a quote from Henry Kissinger to go next to his photo

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Gorsuch was listed as the editor and founder of The Federalist Paper at Columbia University, where he chose a quote from Henry Kissinger to go next to his photo the illegal we do immediately, the unconst takers longer

He listed his other student activities as ‘President of the Yard, Student Government’ and ‘Lousy Spanish Student.’ He said he was also president of a group called the ‘Committee to reform The Beast.’

His senior quote was: ‘I am not an alkie; I never wrote a debate case!’

Gorsuch is shown in another senior photo waving his hand mid-speech outside one of the campus buildings while wearing a blue and black tie. In another, he is pictured at the bottom of a six-boy pyramid while balancing another student on his shoulders.

Georgetown Preparatory is one of the top all-boys prep schools in the United States. Former students include Sen. Chris Dodd, a handful of U.S. congressmen, and multiple members of the Kennedy family. Current tuition is $30,000 a year for day students and $50,000 a year for boarding students.

At 49 years old, Gorsuch would be the youngest nominee to the Supreme Court in 25 years. He currently lives in Boulder, Colorado with his wife, Marie Louise.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4182852/Trump-s-SCOTUS-pick-founded-club-called-Fascism-Forever.html

DailyMail

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2017-02-03/judicial-crisis-network-releases-ad-supporting-neil-gorsuch-for-supreme-court

day after a liberal activist group unveiled an ad criticizing the conservative views of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, the conservative Judicial Crisis Network countered Friday with an ad extolling the judge's fair-mindedness -- starring a young woman who worked for former President Barack Obama.

"I don't think folks on the left should be concerned about Judge Gorsuch becoming a Supreme Court justice," Jane Nitze, one of his former law clerks on the federal appeals court,, titled "Jane."

[vid]

The JCN ad is the latest shot in what's likely to be highly partisan, take-no-prisoners political warfare in the Senate over Gorsuch, a 49-year-old federal appellate judge whom President Donald Trump introduced to the nation Tuesday night.

While Republicans hail Gorsuch as an outstanding writer and brilliant legal thinker with impeccable credentials, some Democratic senators -- still seething that Gorsuch may get to fill a Supreme Court vacancy "stolen" by Republicans from Obama -- say the Colorado judge is a right-wing ideologue who won't ensure justice for all.

In an ad released Thursday, People for the American Way, a liberal activist group, portrayed Gorsuch as a jurist beholden to "powerful interests," including Trump.. If confirmed by the Senate, according to the ad, Gorsuch would disregard the Constitution and trample on the rights of women and minorities.

The testimonial in Friday's ad from Nitze directly counters that portrayal.

####

Seated in a warmly lit room, Nitze -- identified onscreen as "A Former Obama Administration Attorney" -- says she clerked for Gorsuch from 2008 to 2009, and found him to be "extraordinarily fair-minded."

As pleasant piano music plays in the background, photos from Gorsuch's White House introduction Tuesday appear onscreen. Nitze continues, saying Gorsuch "will approach each case the same, regardless of the issues or the parties before him."

Then, she delivers the kicker: "I worked for the Obama administration" and "I have to say, I am 100 percent comfortable with Judge Gorsuch becoming the next Supreme Court justice."

JCN officials said the ad will start airing Friday in a $2 million broadcast, cable, satellite and digital ad buy in Washington, D.C., as well as Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota and Colorado -- states with vulnerable Democratic incumbents. The organization has pledged to spend a total of $10 million in advertising and lobbying efforts to get the Republican-majority Senate to confirm Gorsuch over strong Democratic opposition.

:{READ::(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: [Donald Trump, Supreme Court Nominee Neil Gorsuch and the Free Press' Future]

"Neil Gorsuch is exceptionally qualified, a fair and independent judge who bases his decisions on the Constitution, and he is widely respected on both sides of the aisle," Carrie Severino, JCN's chief counsel, said in a statement announcing the offensive.

"Some Democrats may be tempted to obstruct his nomination, but we have already launched a robust campaign in key states and we will ultimately force vulnerable Senators to choose between obstructing and keeping their Senate seats," she said.

esquire

The only time Gorsuch got a little shaky was early on, when he was asked about his time in the Justice Department under C-Plus Augustus. It was right around the time when the government got a little antsy about having violated about 10,000 covenants regarding torture, and when even Republicans were beginning to realize that Dick Cheney and his pet lawyers were a claque of bloodthirsty Saracens. There was a scramble to re-establish legal delicacy in the era of the waterboard and Enhanced Interrogation, and Gorsuch was right in the middle of it.

Something called the Detainee Treatment Act was passed in 2005. And Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein quizzed Gorsuch on his role as a DOJ lawyer in the extended aftermath, intimating that Gorsuch had advised the administration on how to get around the provisions of the new law. She asked:

After the passage of the Detainee Treatment Act, you advocated President Bush issue a signing statement to accompany the law. In an e-mail you sent…you said the signing statement would, and I quote, these are your words, inoculate against the potential of having the administration criticized some time in the future for not making sufficient changes in interrogation policy in light of the McCain portion of the amendment. This statement clearly, and in a normal way that would be hard to dispute later, puts down a marker to the effect that McCain is best read as essentially codifying existing administrative policies, unquote. To be clear, the context was that, earlier in 2005, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel had concluded that CIA interrogation tactics like waterboarding and sleep deprivation did not mean cruel treatment. Saying that Senator McCain's amendment actually codified them was not true. Doesn't it mean that, when you wrote this e-mail, you were condoning waterboarding?

Gorsuch was suddenly far less sure of himself, pleading that he was "one voice among a great many," and that he would have to look at the contemporaneous documents to be sure. I don't know about you, but, if I were an American lawyer, I'd remember if I'd greenlit torture. Later, when the committee came back from lunch, Gorsuch spectacularly asserted to Senator Richard Durbin that, because he had gobbled a sandwich at lunch, he couldn't recall the substance of the e-mail.

Remember, of course, that this is the nominee of a guy who promised "waterboarding and worse" as a national policy. Even by the laws of absurdity, a sandwich is not an alibi here.

Neil Gorsuch Knows What Dark Money Is, and What That Money Expects of Him

Enough with the absurd notion that the Supreme Court is apolitical.

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE

MAR 21, 2017

WASHINGTON—Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, had had it up to his eyeballs. He had sat in the Senate Judiciary Committee and listened to Neil Gorsuch, a nominee for the Supreme Court, fielding juvenile questions from his Republican colleagues, most of which centered on pieces of pet legislation—Lindsey Graham's bogus "fetal pain" bill, John Cornyn's worries about religion in the public square—and the essential question of, "Tell us why you're an awesome judge."

(That started on Monday, by the way, when Nebraska's Ben Sasse presented what amounted to a middle-school civics project by way of introducing himself to the nominee.)

Whitehouse also had sat through Gorsuch's folksy-is-as-folksy-does flummery about how a nun had paddled him into being able to read, how ol' Whizzer White had skated through his hearing in 90 minutes, fueled only by unfiltered Camels, and how Gorsuch had "taken a little jog" down to the Lincoln Memorial before meeting the committee in order to Think Big Thoughts. (He got a bit flummoxed between the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural.) He also had sat through Gorsuch's endless pieties about how he was as apolitical as the morning dew, and that was about where Sheldon Whitehouse had stood all he could and he couldn't stand no more.

He was done with the preposterous notion that the political act of nominating judges should contain no politics. And he had a precise example to share.

There's been a lot of talk about how this is outside of politics and how we're above politics but there is a group planning to spend $10 million in which their own press release describes as a comprehensive campaign of paid advertising, earned media, research, grassroots activity, and a coalition enterprise all adding up to the most robust operation in the history of confirmation battles.

Gorsuch, of course, for all his academic achievements and professional accomplishments, is also a product of the conservative movement and the hundreds of luxurious ideological terrariums from which they produce congresscritters, professional pundits and, yes, federal judges. (His ties to longtime wingnut sugar daddy Philip Anschutz are a matter of public record.) And there is a sophisticated and purely political campaign currently underway outside the rarefied air of a Senate committee room. (The sidewalks outside of the Hart Building were thick on Tuesday morning with fresh-faced young people waving very well-produced signs.)

Gorsuch Doesn't Mind $10 Million in Dark Money

Whitehouse had him there and, through his questioning, managed to make Gorsuch look ridiculous on the matter of money in politics. Whitehouse kept hammering at Gorsuch about whether Gorsuch thought the anonymous benefactors who are shoveling dark money into his confirmation fight should be identified. Gorsuch kept trying to throw it back on Congress. If Congress wanted this kind of transparency, he argued, it should pass a law requiring it.

(Here is where we pause to note that this argument in relationship to the Citizens United decision is fundamentally moot. As written, Citizens United pretty much preemptively ruled any attempt to limit campaign money to be an unconstitutional restriction of free speech. It also was used almost immediately to demolish state laws on campaign finance. The only real solution to Citizens United in a constitutional amendment to overturn it, but Gorsuch knows that's an almost impossible standard to meet.)

Getty

Whitehouse was having none of it. He pointed out that many of the same people funding the political operation in support of Gorsuch's nomination also were behind a $7 million drive to deny Merrick Garland even a hearing when he was nominated by former president Barack Obama. Whitehouse said:

What's interesting is that this group sees a difference between him [Garland] and you that I don't understand…now we have $10 million going the other way. That's a $17 million delta and for the life of me, I'm trying to figure out what they see in you that makes that $17 million worth the spending. Do you have any answer to that?

Gorsuch suggested that, if Whitehouse wanted to know who they were, he should ask them.

"I can't," Whitehouse said. "I don't know who they are. It's just a front group."

"I DON'T KNOW WHO THEY ARE. IT'S JUST A FRONT GROUP."

For the first time all day, Gorsuch's aw-shucks, lemme-tell-you-about-Oxford demeanor cracked just a little. Whitehouse was calling into question the legitimacy of his nomination because it was produced by a political system the legitimacy of which has been undermined by a flood of uncontrolled anonymous money that was loosed by a series of decisions from the Court that Gorsuch has been nominated to join. This is a genuinely interesting area for exploration that Gorsuch had no intention of entering without a helmet and pads.

Senator, I have no information about anything you just described. I don't know about that.

This is not remotely believable. As Senator Al Franken pointed out later, when he read from e-mails dating back to Gorsuch's days as a high-level Republican lawyer, specifically about his work for the 2004 Bush re-election campaign, Gorsuch has been a political being for his entire adult life and, at the same time, he hasn't spent a second in elected office, so his politics were formed and were exercised almost entirely through the conservative Republican institutional infrastructure.

(Hell, when he was a kid, he was a Senate page. He's been in politics as long as Orrin Hatch.)

He knows what dark money is. He knows where it comes from. He knows the use to which it is put. And he knows what is expected of him when he is confirmed. (Which is not to say we know what he'll do when he's got the robe, although I know pretty well which way to bet.) For the country, it comes down to how much disbelief you're willing to suspend to judge what is produced by this ridiculous shadow play of a process.

Late in the afternoon, while discussing a fairly famous dissenting opinion Gorsuch had written in the case of Trans-Am v. Administration Review Board, United States Department of Labor, Franken had invoked something called the absurdity rule.

In the case, a truck driver named Alphonse Maddin discovered on the highway that the brakes on his trailer had frozen. He pulled off the side of the road and called for help, which never came. The heater in his cab failed, and Maddin soon began exhibiting the symptoms of hypothermia. His bosses told him to wait with his crippled trailer which, even if Maddin were capable of driving safely, which he wasn't, would have been a hazard to his fellow motorists because the frozen brakes on the trailer would have held his speed down to 15 miles per hour. The company fired Maddin. He sued, and won, but Gorsuch dissented.

GORSUCH KNOWS WHAT IS EXPECTED OF HIM WHEN HE IS CONFIRMED.

His dissent was based on the fact that Maddin had driven the vehicle. The driver had sued on the basis of an OSHA regulation that forbade the firing of anyone for refusing to operate an unsafe vehicle. Maddin had in fact "operated" the vehicle so, according to Gorsuch, his firing was justified because of the plain reading of the regulation. Franken asked him whether or not that "plain reading" violated the absurdity rule, an ancient concept that seeks to prevent the literal reading of the law from producing ludicrous results.

It is absurd to say that this company was within its rights to fire him because he made a choice not to—of possibly dying by freezing to death or causing other people to die because he was driving an unsafe vehicle. That's absurd. Now I had a career in identifying absurdity, and I know it when I see it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/02/21/neil-gorsuch-always-sides-with-big-business-big-donors-and-big-bosses/

One of the most important questions for analyzing a potential Supreme Court justice is how he or she understands economic and political power: Who should govern? How should power be distributed in a society? In the case of Neil Gorsuch, the federal appeals judge President Trump has nominated for the high court, the answers are troubling. Gorsuch’s record on the bench reveals a man with a strong top-down streak, a preference for concentrated wealth and power. He has consistently been the friend of big business and monopolies at the expense of competition and open markets, and the friend of big donors at the expense of small donors. In disputes between the employee and employer, he sides with the boss.

How judges interpret antitrust law is especially important in understanding their approach to the relationship between economic and political power. It tells you a lot about what they think counts as fair and free competition between citizens. It also teaches us whether they understand markets as institutions — formed through rules and subject to public governance — or instead as some mythic set of natural forces, beyond our control.

[Trump is getting payments from foreign governments. We have no idea what they are.]

Big antitrust cases, although rare, can reshape our entire economy. When the late justice Antonin Scalia was questioned about antitrust during his confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court in 1986, he joked that he never understood antitrust in law school and “later found out … that I should not have understood it because it did not make any sense.”

The joke was on American democracy: Scalia proceeded to undermine basic tenets of competition law for the next 30 years. In Verizon v. Trinko, he narrowed the scope of the Sherman Antitrust Act when his majority opinion held that Verizon’s alleged failure to share its network as required by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 didn’t constitute an antitrust violation. Although the holding of Trinko was narrow, its logic was broad, and the ruling had a chilling effect on prosecutions. Trinko is part of the reason a handful of big companies now dominate U.S. markets for cable, drugs, hospital beds, seeds, eyeglasses, office supplies, milk, beer and books.

Antitrust law is quasi-constitutional: The founding federal documents, like the Sherman Act, are spare. Section 2 of the Sherman Act declares simply: “Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony.”

In the 137 years since Congress passed the Sherman Act, two sharply different philosophies have emerged as to the purpose and meaning of these words.

Our great democratic justices understood the Sherman Act as a “charter of liberty.” They required that the nation protect the freedom of the independent business owner and an open marketplace and prosecute those people who sought to dominate other people or the political system. Justices such as Louis Brandeis believed that it was vital to use antitrust law to distribute power and opportunity as widely as possible in society, because excessive concentrations of power threatened our personal liberties and our democracy itself.

Our anti-democratic justices, such as Scalia and the other students of the Chicago School’s “law and economics” philosophy, have promoted a view of antitrust law that allows the rich and powerful to do whatever they will to the independent businessman and farmer, and for the few to exercise political control over the many. They hold that, in political economics at least, might is right.

The economic ideology of the next Supreme Court justice matters particularly today because the United States — as a growing body of evidence confirms — faces a crisis of concentrated economic and political power. This crisis is affecting our politics, as a growing number of Americans think that the profits from the labor of many are unfairly taken by a wealthy few.

President Trump spoke to that anger when he promised, during his campaign, to take on abuses by Amazon (whose chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Washington Post), block the AT&T-Time Warner merger and break up big banks. His promises may prove meaningless. Indeed, his choice of Gorsuch indicates that Trump actually intends to further promote this dangerous concentration of power in the United States.

Gorsuch is an authority on this subject. He has long taught antitrust law at the University of Colorado, and as a judge, he has written decisions in antitrust cases. His record shows that he is a strict follower of the formalistic theories of Chicago School economics and willfully ignores the realities of how markets and economic power work.Put into practice, Gorsuch’s theories will make the nation more unequal and less free.

[Yes, the GOP broke Supreme Court nominations. But blocking Gorsuch won’t fix them.]

On antitrust, Gorsuch has repeatedly blessed actions by big firms to exploit their dominant position.His rulings reveal a tendency to reward concentration of private power and to enfeeble the laws and public institutions tasked with keeping the economy open and competitive. In *Novell v. Microsoft* and in *Four Corners Nephrology Associates P.C. v. Mercy Medical Center of Durango*, Gorsuch found no antitrust violations despite substantial evidence that a dominant player used its power to push out rivals.

In the Novell case, Novell presented evidence that Microsoft pulled a bait-and-switch on a competitor for no reason other than to push the competitor out of the market, and 11 out of 12 jurors found Microsoft guilty. But the case was dismissed, and Gorsuch upheld the dismissal. He wrote that “antitrust laws don’t turn private parties into bounty hunters entitled to a windfall anytime they can ferret out anticompetitive conduct lurking somewhere in the marketplace.” That sounds eloquent. But its implications are immense. Gorsuch elevated the writings of conservative academics above the congressional intent underpinning antitrust law. He concluded that a monopolist’s predatory conduct is not an antitrust violation, except under extraordinary circumstances. In practice, Gorsuch’s opinion gives monopolists virtual carte blanche to perpetuate their dominance through unfair means, regardless of the consequences for consumers, competitors and citizens.

In corruption law, Gorsuch’s record is equally dismal. In a concurrence to a decision on campaign finance in 2014, he suggested that donating to a politician is a “fundamental” right that ought to be afforded the highest form of constitutional protection, which is known as “strict scrutiny review,” more protected even than the right to vote (which is not afforded “strict scrutiny”). This matters because Gorsuch could vote to strike down the existing limits of $2,700 per person for a federal candidate, allowing unlimited personal and corporate direct donations to candidates. Wealthy donors and corporations, already too powerful, would then be legally allowed to directly scheme with candidates and dictate policy and campaign strategy. This approach flies in the face of public opinion, since polling suggests that the vast majority of voters want the Supreme Court to limit the influence of big money in politics....

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/3/20/zephyr_teachout_supreme_court_pick_neil

Confirmation hearings begin today for Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s pick to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. If confirmed by the Senate, Gorsuch would give conservatives a narrow 5-4 majority on the court. When he was first nominated, Gorsuch praised Antonin Scalia. As a judge on the Tenth Circuit, Neil Gorsuch ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby in the case deciding whether the company could refuse to provide birth control coverage to employees as required by Obamacare. Judge Gorsuch also has a long history of ruling against employees in cases involving federal race, sex, age, disability and political discrimination and retaliation claims. For more, we speak with Fordham law professor Zephyr Teachout. She recently ran for a congressional seat in upstate New York. Her recent piece for The Washington Post is headlined "Neil Gorsuch sides with big business, big donors and big bosses."

As confirmation hearings begin for Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, we look at his record on voting rights and speak with Ari Berman, senior contributing writer for The Nation. His recent piece is headlined "In E-mails, Neil Gorsuch Praised a Leading Republican Activist Behind Voter Suppression Efforts."

The Nation’s Ari Berman into the conversation. He recently wrote a piece headlined "In E-mails, Neil Gorsuch Praised a Leading Republican Activist Behind Voter Suppression Efforts."

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/3/20/college_classmate_neil_gorsuch_attacked_anti

GONZÁLEZ: Well, I’d also like to bring into the conversation Jordan Kushner. He’s a civil rights and criminal defense attorney in Minneapolis. He was an undergraduate student at Columbia University at the same time as Neil Gorsuch. While on campus, Gorsuch co-founded the right-wing campus newspaper The Federalist Paper. The Associated Press reports that in Gorsuch’s writing both for The Federalist Paper and the Columbia Daily Spectator, on which I worked when I was an undergraduate there, he criticized anti-apartheid protests, saying divestment could hurt the university’s endowment. He also criticized racial justice protests and black-led movements on campus, while he defended the Reagan administration during the Iran-Contra scandal.

Jordan Kushner, welcome to Democracy Now!

JORDAN KUSHNER: Thank you. Good to be here.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, tell us about your interactions with Neil Gorsuch when you were both undergraduates there.

JORDAN KUSHNER: Well, the protect—progressive activists personally got singled out for attack. I think what stands out about Neil Gorsuch was that his views were completely formed as soon as he entered college as a freshman, which I think is unusual, and he had very solid right-wing reactionary views from the beginning. He was also, on a personal level, very polished and affable. And I think this is part of a consistent pattern, where he has a real commitment to reactionary politics and is able to put an appealing face on it.

And his positions really, I think, were extreme. He did attack South African divestment, after the university had already decided to divest. And he put out a real divisive argument that it was going to hurt student aid. He attacked a protest led by black students against racism on campus, not based on the substance of the issue, but saying that people involved were revolutionaries. He did stick up for Ronald Reagan in the Iran-Contra affair, Iran-Contra scandal, which was an extreme position even for conservatives at the time. And, I think, perhaps ominously, he said that it was within Ronald Reagan’s executive power to engage in these covert operations, where he engaged—he worked with one hostile regime to finance the Iran-Contras—to finance the Contras in Nicaragua, which were—people might not know who are watching this, who weren’t around at the time, but they were a really reactionary, CIA-funded group that was trying to overthrow the legitimate government in Nicaragua. And he put in a real strong defense of the Contras and said it was really urgent that they succeed.

And I think the other aspect of him that’s really consistent here is that he—whenever he attacked, attacked these left—these progressive positions and attacked progressive activists, which he did a lot of, it was never based on the merits of the issue. It was always based on some other reason. So, the—again, so South African divestment, it’s not an issue of apartheid being wrong, it’s an issue of having student aid, or that these protests aren’t bad, but the protesters are bad because they’re revolutionaries or they’re superficial. He made a lot of claims that they didn’t really know what they were doing, and they just enjoyed protesting. And that seems consistent with a lot of what he does as a judge, where he doesn’t really address the merits of the issue, but comes up with legal reasons for making unjust decisions.

And, you know, one opinion he made that really stands out is against a—that’s gotten some publicity, is where he dissented in a case involving a truck driver who got fired because his truck broke down on the side of the road at nighttime in the winter, and he thought he was freezing to death, so he drove his—left the trailer and drove the cab of his truck to a gas station so he could save himself, and he got fired. The NLRB, or the federal agency, sided with him. Two of the three judges on the court of appeals sided with him. But Judge Gorsuch dissented, saying that the plain language of the law didn’t protect him from being fired. So here’s a case where you have an extremely, extremely inhumane treatment of the worker, and Judge Gorsuch decides that he has to just stick with what he sees as the plain language of the statute, which is something that other people disagree with. So he’s willing to interpret laws in a way that comes up—comes out to really unjust results.

And so, I think his—if you look at the kind of positions he took in college, even though he was a polished, affable person, the positions he took were really ruthless. And that seems to be a continuing pattern when he’s an appeal judge. And I think we can presume it’s going to be that way as a Supreme Court judge, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you, back in college, one, he founded The Federalist Paper, a very conservative newspaper, to counter the Columbia Daily Spectator. But in 1987, in a column he wrote in the Columbia Daily Spectator, Gorsuch opposed divesting from apartheid South Africa, arguing, quote, "Pro-divestment students call for the immediate withdrawal of University funds from all companies conducting business in South Africa. But in their haste to do the Right Thing, they are willing to overlook such mundane things as facts. Namely, that many of these companies are themselves in the act of divesting. Committee and coalition members seem willing to sacrifice the large income from the endowment—which goes to pay for our need-blind admissions policy, among other things." Can you talk about the politics at the time on campus, the divestment movement so often credited by the democratic movement in South Africa as helping to bring the apartheid movement down—the apartheid government down?

JORDAN KUSHNER: Sure. Well, you know, the interesting thing is that, I mean, I think divestment was a done deal on campus by two years by the time he wrote that column. And he was—I mean, the university had already decided to divest, in response to a massive, massive student protest, and that it really affected the national agenda. And here he is, about almost two years later, still attacking the idea of divestment. His group, I remember, also brought in a speaker from a right-wing think tank to denounce divestment, as well. And so, this is someone who’s really clinging to reactionary views and coming up with really divisive arguments, trying to turn students against the ideas, saying that these activists are your enemies because they’re going to hurt your ability to be able to continue to go to Columbia College. And so he’s coming up with real divisive arguments, as well. So, I think it’s—I think his positions certainly are disturbing and insidious on many levels.

And on one hand, you don’t want to hold against someone something that they did in college, but, again, I think it’s part of a consistent pattern here. He had really strong right-wing ties through his family connections coming into college. He got Coors beer funding, which is a notoriously right-wing advocate—corporation that had notoriously right-wing positions. And this is something that’s continued with his connections throughout his career, you know, working with billionaires, working—being a very active member of the Federalist Society, which is the main right-wing law organization that produces a lot of the judges that are on the federal bench. And so—

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to—

JORDAN KUSHNER: So we have a—

AMY GOODMAN: Jordan, I wanted to wrap up with Zephyr Teachout in Albany, New York, professor at Fordham, about an NPR report that says a former law student of Judge Neil Gorsuch alleges that in the course she took from Gorsuch at the University of Colorado Law School last year, the judge told his class that employers, specifically law firms, should ask women seeking jobs about their plans for having children, and implied that women manipulate companies, starting in the interview stage, to extract maternity benefits. So we’re going from him in college to him this past year teaching at University of Colorado.

ZEPHYR TEACHOUT: Wow! I hadn’t seen that report. But I

...

http://www.salon.com/2017/03/15/supreme-court-nominee-neil-gorsuch-has-close-ties-to-conservative-megadonor-activist-philip-anschutz/

Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court, Judge Neil Gorsuch, has been variously criticized as too liberal or too conservative, or in some cases as simply being a slap in the face of good governance. Yet now there is a new controversy emerging around Gorsuch — the Supreme Court nominee who’s replacing Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland — he has a long-lasting connection to Colorado billionaire Philip F. Anschutz.

Anschutz, whose business empire ranges from real estate and telecommunications to railroads and oil and gas, is first known to have been connected to Gorsuch in the early 2000s, when Gorsuch represented both Anschutz and his companies as an outside counsel from the firm Kellogg Huber, according to The New York Times. Given Anschutz’s ownership of conservative publications like The Weekly Standard and The Washington Examiner, it is quite likely that he shares a sense of ideological kinship with Gorsuch, who has long been on the conservative end of the political spectrum.

Anschultz’s support played a key role in Gorsuch’s nomination to a federal appeals court in 2006. President Trump’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees was given to him by the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, both of which receive donations from Anschutz.

Although it is unclear whether Gorsuch and Anschultz are friends (Anschultz is notoriously private), Gorsuch has frequently spoken at Anschultz’s lavish retreats at his 60-square-mile Eagles Nest Ranch. Similarly, Gorsuch shares a limited-liability company with two of Anschultz’s “lieutenants,” the Times notes, with the three of them co-owning a 40-acre property in the Colorado mountains.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/us/politics/neil-gorsuch-supreme-court.html

While Gorscuh’s past with Anschultz is not necessarily unusual, it is concerning that (as The Times reported) “the judge appears to be leaving the door open to participating in Anschutz-related cases on the Supreme Court.” That could pose a conflict of interest if Gorsuch fails to adequately address it.

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/2/6/headlines/neil_gorsuch_opposed_anti_apartheid_protesters_in_college

Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch has scheduled more than a dozen meetings with senators on Capitol Hill this week. The meetings come as more information is emerging about Gorsuch, including his right-wing writings and political views from his time as a student at Columbia University in the mid-1980s. While on campus, Gorsuch co-founded the right-wing campus newspaper the Federalist Paper. The Associated Press reports that inGorsuch’s writing both for the Federalist Paperand the Columbia Daily Spectator, he criticized anti-apartheid protests, saying divestment could hurt the university’s endowment. He also criticized racial justice protests and black-led movements on campus, while he defended the Reagan administration during the Iran-Contra scandal.

For four decades, the Supreme Court’s flawed approach to money in politics has gutted common-sense protections against the power of special interests and wealthy individuals, and shaped a system that 85% of Americans believe needs fundamental changes.

More than 90% of voters (including 91% of Trump voters) think it’s important that President Trump nominates a Supreme Court justice who is open to limiting the influence of big money in politics. [Hattaway, 2017].
Yet, Trump has pledged to nominate someone in the mold of Justice Scalia, an ardent opponent of limits on big money. And Trump’s nominees were vetted by White House Counsel Don McGahn, one of the commissioners most hostile to money-in-politics rules in the history of the Federal Election Commission.

Judge Gorsuch’s Money-in-Politics Record

Judge Gorsuch’s record on money in politics, while sparse, raises significant concerns.

In his only opinion directly addressing money in politics, Judge Gorsuch expressed openness to providing a higher level of constitutional protection to a donor’s right to make political contributions than the Court currently affords the right to vote.¹Judge Gorsuch’s openness to applying rigid “strict scrutiny” review to contribution limits—one of the few remaining checks on big money we have left, thanks to the Supreme Court—puts him among the ranks of justices extremely hostile to this issue, such as Thomas and Scalia, and is cause for serious concern.²
In Riddle v. Hickenlooper, Judge Gorsuch joined a Tenth Circuit panel in striking down an ill-advised Colorado statute that imposed lower campaign contribution limits on minor party candidates than the limits applying to major party candidates.³Because the statute wasdiscriminatory, the outcome of the case is not cause for concern in and of itself.
What is troubling, however, is that Judge Gorsuch went out of his way to write a concurring opinion suggesting that making a political contribution is a “fundamental” right that ought to be afforded the highest form of constitutional protection, which is known as “strict scrutiny review.”⁴
- As the highest form of constitutional protection, strict scrutiny review is reserved for our most precious rights, like the right to be free from discrimination on the basis of race or religion, or the right to express an unpopular viewpoint. Sometimes the Court doesn’t even apply this level of scrutiny to restrictions on the right to vote itself.⁵
- In recent years, the Supreme Court’s 5-4 majority has applied strict scrutiny review to strike down laws governing money spent independently of candidates. If the court were to follow Judge Gorsuch’s reasoning and apply strict scrutiny to laws governing direct contributions to candidates, many remaining protections against big money in politics would similarly fall.
- It is precisely this approach that has created a system in which single individuals and corporations can spend tens of millions of dollars to influence elections, and in which candidates and elected officials are significantly more responsive to the priorities of an elite donor class that is richer, whiter, and more male than Americans on the whole.

Broader Democracy Law

Judge Gorsuch is hostile to regulations on the corporate sector and has a record of ruling against consumers and working Americans.⁶
In the Hobby Lobby case, Judge Gorsuch joined a troubling extension of the Supreme Court’s holding in Citizens United v. FEC,⁷ in favor of corporate personhood.Specifically, the Tenth Circuit ruled that privately held, for-profit secular corporations are “persons” under the meaning of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), and could qualify for religious exemptions from the Affordable Care Act’s mandate to provide reproductive health services.⁸

Other Causes for Concern on Money in Politics

Like others on Trump’s short list, Judge Gorsuch has ties to the Chamber of Commerce—the single-largest lobby in the country comprised of corporate giants from the pharmaceutical, oil, and other industries, and which has spent tens of millions of dollars in elections while keeping its donors secret.⁹ Before becoming a judge on the Tenth Circuit, Gorsuch represented the National Chamber of Commerce, arguing in favor of rules that would make it more difficult to hold companies accountable for securities fraud.¹⁰
Judge Gorsuch has described his own jurisprudence as backward-looking.¹¹ On numerous occasions he has ruled against plaintiffs claiming to have been discriminated against on the basis of race, and his ruling in favor of law enforcement in an excessive use of force case raises concerns that his jurisprudence would continue to entrench systemic “colorblind” racism in the United States.¹²

Endnotes

(CNN)In only a few weeks, Judge Neil Gorsuch has gone from the federal appellate bench in Colorado, to one of the leading contenders to be President Donald Trump's nominee for the US Supreme Court.

His quick ascent is due to a combination of factors, including his track record, demeanor and the impression he has made on Trump and the small circle advising him on how to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Another factor -- one beyond Gorsuch's control -- is likely also in play: the fiery atmosphere on Capitol Hill as Democrats vow to make the Supreme Court hearings one of the biggest fights in the early days of the Trump presidency.

Trump said Wednesday on Twitter that he will make his choice to fill the open seat on the court next Thursday, February 2, but he did not give any indication of whom that nominee would be.

These days Gorsuch's name -- previously unknown to many -- has been on the tip of the tongue of court watchers waiting anxiously to see who Trump eventually decides upon. Sources say that Gorsuch is one of the leading contenders of a very short list that also includes Judges William Pryor and Thomas Hardiman.

The pick could be announced as early as next week. Trump met Tuesday to discuss the upcoming nomination with Vice President Mike Pence, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, as well as Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and Sens. Chuck Grassley and Dianne Feinstein.

Gorsuch, 49, has been on the radar of some judicial conservatives for some time. He has long been a favorite of legal thinkers at the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation.

Conservatives welcome his opinions on religious liberty. For instance, he has sided with closely held corporations who argued that the so called contraceptive mandate violated their religious beliefs.

In another opinion, he challenged the notion that courts should defer to administrative agencies when they interpret the law. It may seem like a dry legal issue but it is central to many conservatives, including Justice Clarence Thomas.

"Judge Gorsuch has been a stern critic of a fixture of the Supreme Court's administrative law jurisprudence -- the idea that, where a federal agency is enforcing an ambiguous statute, courts should defer to how the agency understands the statute even if the courts read it differently," said Stephen I. Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court contributor and professor of law at the University of Texas School of Law.

"If he were to form part of a majority to scale back that principle, it would be a major sea change in the relationship between the executive branch and the courts, and one that would likely impose significant new constraints on the scope of federal regulatory authority on all topics -- from immigration and criminal law enforcement to environmental protection, consumer product safety, and drug regulation," Vladeck said.

"His position on this is more extreme than Justice Scalia," said Dan Goldberg of the progressive Alliance for Justice, "it would be hard to overstate the damage it would cause this nation and the American people."

Examining the top contenders on Trump's Supreme Court list

Goldberg calls Gorsuch an "extreme" candidate for his other opinions as well touching on issues such as a women's rights to access of reproductive health care and the rights of workers and consumers.

But as liberals pore through his record, conservatives stress other factors they say work in his favor.

For instance, he is from one of those square "fly over states" -- Colorado -- and could bring new perspective to the court. At the same time, he spent formative years in Washington where he lived while his mother, Anne Gorsuch Burford, held a top job in the Reagan administration. He also worked in the Department of Justice. He's an outsider -- with an insider's experience.

"I think the conservatives will love him and the liberals will find very little to fault," said Mark Hansen, a former partner of Gorsuch at Kellogg Huber Hansen. "He's an affable, collegial, unpretentious man with a good sense of humor."

Shortly after the election, Adam Feldman, who runs a blog called Empirical Scotus, wrote a piece entitled "An Alternate Take on Trump's Potential Supreme Court Nominees." He ranked the list of candidates and put Gorsuch in the top tier. The criteria for his study included decisions or positions that aligned with Trump in areas such as abortion, gun rights, the Affordable Care Act, and judicial philosophy.

"Although he has not written a decision in any of the controversial policy areas, he regularly uses originalist principles in his decisions," Feldman wrote. And he added that Gorsuch "ranks highly conservative" based on his perceived ideology.

Although Gorsuch has written on issues such as the contraceptive mandate and even penned a book making a legal and moral argument against assisted suicide, he has never had the opportunity to write an opinion on Roe v. Wade. That has raised only a few eyebrows in pro-life circles, others express complete confidence that he won't disappoint them on that front.

Gorsuch is also one of the few on Trump's list who went to an Ivy League school. Not only did he attend Columbia and Harvard Law School but he also studied in Oxford under John Finnis, who now works at the University of Notre Dame and specializes in moral, political and legal theory.

As Trump's teams compares the pros and cons of their top list they will have to deal with the fact that Democrats, led by Schumer, have made clear that the nomination hearings will be a fight. Not lost on them will be the fact that unlike Pryor, who was a part of incredibly contentious hearings, Gorsuch sailed through with no opposition. Placed side by side, McConnell might think Gorsuch, with his laid back style and easy demeanor might have a better chance with Democrats.

Gorsuch was a clerk for Justice Anthony Kennedy, but in a speech last April at Case Western Reserve University School of law, Gorsuch honored the late conservative icon Scalia.

In a speech at Case Western Gorsuch said judges should strive "to apply the law as it is, focusing backward, not forward, and looking to text, structure, and history to decide what a reasonable reader at the time of the events in question would have understood the law to be -- not to decide cases based on their own moral convictions or the policy consequences they believe might serve society best."

It was vintage Scalia.

or maybe no hope

eil McGill Gorsuch is a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. He was nominated by George W. Bush on May 10, 2006, and confirmed by the Senate on July 20, 2006. He is the son of Anne Burford, the first female head of the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

Judge Gorsuch, a native of Denver, is a graduate of Harvard Law School (cum laude) and holds a Doctorate in Legal Philosophy from Oxford University. After clerking for a U.S. Court of Appeals Judge, he was chosen to be a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy. After gaining extensive experience in litigating complex cases in federal court while in private practice, Mr. Gorsuch was named Principal Deputy to the Associate Attorney General of the United States. He is the son of former Environmental Protection Agency Director Anne Gorsuch.

Education

Columbia University, B.A., 1988
Harvard Law School, J.D., 1991
Oxford University, D.Phil., 2004

The Federalist Society takes no position on particular legal or public policy issues. The people listed as Experts have spoken or otherwise participated in Federalist Society events, publications, or multimedia presentations. A person's appearance on this list does not imply any other endorsement or relationship between the person and the Federalist Society. All expressions of opinion by an expert are those of the expert.

Publications and Multimedia

13th Annual Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture - Event Audio/Video

2013 National Lawyers Convention

November 22, 2013 on discovery?

Dodd-Frank: Act Two and What's Next in Financial Services Laws and Regulations? - Event Audio/Video

2012 National Lawyers Convention

November 19, 2012

hope: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/07/14/3680340/colorado-renewable-energy-decision/

Colorado’s ambitious renewable energy standard will remain in place thanks to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, which on Monday shielded the law from a legal attack by a right-wing litigation group.

Writing for a three-judge panel,U.S. Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch affirmed that the clean energy law does not violate the U.S. Constitution, as the plaintiff Energy and Environment Legal Institute had argued. E&E Legal, formerly called the American Tradition Institute, is a nonprofit that advocates a “free-market approach” to environmentalism. It is the same entity that launched a high-profile lawsuit against climate scientist Michael Mann seeking to view his email communications, an effort which ultimately failed.

The case over Colorado’s renewable energy law was E&E Legal’s second most high-profile case. The group launched the lawsuit back in 2011, arguing that the clean energy standard — which requires utilities to get 30 percent of the electricity they sell to Colorado customers from renewable sources — violated the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

More specifically, the group said that the law unfairly harmed out-of-state businesses. Colorado relies on other states to get a good portion of its electricity, the group argued, and therefore out-of-state coal producers would be disproportionately harmed.

Judge Gorsuch disagreed, saying that while out-of-state coal producers would likely be hurt, it wasn’t disproportionate. Indeed, financial harm to fossil fuel companies would likely be equal across the board.

“To be sure, fossil fuel producers like [E&E Legal]’s member will be hurt,” Judge Gorsuch wrote. “But as far as we know, all fossil fuel producers in the area served by the grid will be hurt equally and all renewable energy producers in the area will be helped equally. If there’s any disproportionate adverse effect felt by out-of-state producers or any disproportionate advantage enjoyed by in-state producers, it hasn’t been explained to this court.”

Gorsuch also noted that if the mandate raises electricity prices for Colorado residents, that didn’t matter either — because Colorado voters had approved the law in 2004 with “overwhelming support.”

“That’s a cost they are apparently happy to bear,” he wrote.

Colorado is a national leader in clean energy, in part due to the state’s ambitious renewable energy standard. The state is home to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is the federal government’s primary research facility for renewable energy and energy efficiency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Gorsuch

Neil McGill Gorsuch (born August 29, 1967 in Denver, Colorado) is a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.^[1] He is the son of Anne Burford, the first female head of the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

[hide]

Background

Gorsuch graduated from the Georgetown Preparatory School and received a B.A. from Columbia University (where he was co-founder and first chief editor of the alternative newspaper The Fed and won a Truman Scholarship). He earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School and Doctorate of Legal Philosophy from Oxford University, where he studied as a Marshall Scholar at University College.

Gorsuch clerked for Judge David B. Sentelle on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1991–1992, and then for United States Supreme Court Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy from 1993-1994.

From 1995-2005, Judge Gorsuch was in private practice with the Washington, D.C. law firm of Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel. He was a Deputy Associate Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice from 2005 until 2006.

His first book, The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, was published by Princeton University Press in July 2006.

Tenth Circuit nomination and confirmation

Gorsuch was nominated by President George W. Bush on May 10, 2006 to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit vacated by Judge David M. Ebel (also a former clerk of Supreme CourtJustice Byron R. White) who took Senior status in 2006. Gorsuch was confirmed just over two months later on July 20, 2006 by voice vote in the U.S. Senate.^[2] Gorsuch was President Bush's fifth appointment to the Tenth Circuit.

Since he took office, Gorsuch has sent many of his law clerks on to become Supreme Court clerks, and he is regarded as a "feeder judge."^[3]

References

External links

Last week, an investiture ceremony was held for Judge Neil Gorsuch, recently confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. And it was a star-studded affair. From the Denver Post:

Seven-year-old Emma and 5-year-old Belinda helped their father, Neil Gorsuch, into his judge’s robes Monday after the newly appointed 10th Circuit Court judge was sworn in.

Munching on cookies after the formal ceremony, Emma said she thought it “was nice.”

Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who was in Denver to administer the oath, spoke directly to the little girls before Gorsuch raised his right hand. “He’s doing it to remind all of us that the first obligation any American has is to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States,” he said.

Justice Kennedy’s pedagogical impulse is admirable. We suspect, however, that Emma and Belinda were thinking more about cookies than the Constitution.

Some supplementary coverage, from an ATL tipster:

The entire en banc 10th Circuit was present. Justice Kennedy administered the oath. Attorney General Gonzales read the commission. Both Colorado Senators made remarks, as did Mark Hansen of Kellogg Huber (the insanely prestigious appellate shop from which Gorsuch rose). Half of the Justice Department was there: Rachel Brand, Elisebeth Collins Cook, Brett Gerry, Wan Kim, Gregory Katsas, among others.

The Gorsuch clerks showed everyone around Denver and got trashed on consecutive nights. Good times were had by all.

Article III groupies, Judge Neil Gorsuch is one to watch. He’s brilliant, he’s young, and he’s incredibly well-connected. Look for him to rise through the ranks of Supreme Court feeder judges in the years to come — and, perhaps, to be nominated to the Court himself someday.

(Judge Gorsuch is taking the seat of Judge David Ebel, who has been the Tenth Circuit’s resident feeder judge for quite some time now. Guess that’s the 10th Circuit’s designated “feeder seat.”)

Update: Would someone be able to locate and/or send us a good photo of Judge Gorsuch for our files? Our quick Googling didn’t produce anything useful.

10th Circuit judge’s oath a family affair [Denver Post]

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_4696868 11/06

Seven-year-old Emma and 5-year-old Belinda helped their father, Neil Gorsuch, into his judge's robes Monday after the newly appointed 10th Circuit Court judge was sworn in.

Munching on cookies after the formal ceremony, Emma said she thought it "was nice."

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was in Denver to administer the oath, spoke directly to the little girls before Gorsuch raised his right hand.

"He's doing it to remind all of us that the first obligation any American has is to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States," he said.

Dozens of members of Gorsuch's family, friends, Colorado's U.S. senators and the U.S. Attorney General packed the federal courthouse. A television monitor showed the proceeding in an overfill room.

Gorsuch's uncle and a friend, who both spoke, described a man with a sense of humor and a commitment to law. A juror once called Gorsuch - 39 years old with a full head of gray hair - Perry Mason after a moving closing argument, said Mark Hansen, a Washington attorney.

"If adversity shows the true character of a person, then Neil showed his resilience, his strength and steadfastness," Hansen said of how Gorsuch handled a difficult case.

Gorsuch was confirmed by the Senate on July 20 and was officially sworn in this summer. The ceremony Monday publicly commemorated his appointment.

Born in Denver, Gorsuch moved to Washington, D.C.

, as a teenager when President Ronald Reagan appointed Gorsuch's mother, Anne M. Gorsuch, to be the first female administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Gorsuch attended Columbia University, Harvard Law School and Oxford. Most recently he served as principal associate attorney general at the Department of Justice.

"As a judge, I hope to emulate the respect for the rule of law, for the decisions and judgments of the elected branches of government, and for the equality and dignity of all persons that shines through in the work of two of my former bosses, Byron White and Justice Kennedy," Gorsuch said.

The 10th Circuit covers 560,625 square miles, nearly 20 percent of the U.S. land mass, and raises some of the most important legal issues of the time, said U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar.

"Deciding cases involving life and death, the reach of government power, the scope of our freedoms and liberties is the daily task of a federal judge. It is a task that requires intellect, compassion, and a dedication to fairness and impartiality," he said. "He has a sense of fairness and impartiality that is a keystone of being a judge."

Washington attorney, speaking of how Gorsuch handled a difficult case

rfk2

1980 coors etc spearheaded Sagebrush Rebellion (corp and rw) turned ctt

into pol power 25 RR: I am a S rebel" Hertiage shadow cabinet, 2k pp

Mandate for Change became blueprint (Coors in kitchen cab). Coors picked

assoc Anne Gorsuch for epa; hubby cattle baron to head BLM, tho had

declared to shut it 25

gorsuch 2 bak

Timeline...

Justice Clarence Thomas defends ‘family trips’ with GOP donor

Supreme Court responds to lawmakers on ethics complaints

A closer look at Judge Neil Gorsuch and class actions

‘A requiem for American democracy’: 5-4 Supreme Court vote rules partisan gerrymandering is ‘beyond the reach of the federal courts’

Gorsuch just handed down the most bloodthirsty and cruel death penalty opinion of the modern era

Gorsuch’s Gory Expansion of Corporate Personhood

Corporations were originally subordinate to We the People

Corporations become legal “persons”

Gorsuch further expands “corporate personhood”

Ending corporate personhood

NRA Freedom Action Foundation buys TV ads to tout guns ahead of Supreme Court hearing

Contents

Background

Tenth Circuit nomination and confirmation

References

See also

External links