Is Gorsuch in the Trump dog house?

Neil Gorsuch is the man who sits on the Supreme Court of the United States because of the ideologue gamesmanship that denied former President Barack Obama a third pick to the high court; thereby allowing Donald Trump the ability to fill the vacancy in the early days of his presidency.

GORSUCH: Confounds ideologues?

Meaning I’m sure that Trump expects Gorsuch to be his reliable vote to take his stance on all issues that come before the court, and also to sway a majority of the rest of the court to do so as well.

WHICH IS WHY I’m finding some humor in the Supreme Court’s ruling Tuesday that struck down a law meant to make it easier (and quicker) to deport non-citizens who are found guilty of violent crimes while in this country.

The nine-member court voted 5-4 to rule in favor of striking down the law, agreeing with a federal appeals court in San Francisco that said it was too vague to be enforceable.

Gorsuch wound up siding with the four members of the court who usually are of a more progressive leaning on issues, even though Gorsuch is supposed to be the swing vote that gives the conservative-leaning justices the numerical advantage.

When considering that Trump is trying to base his political strength from having the support of those people whose idea of immigration reform is to deport as many people as possible, I don’t doubt that Trump felt a bit of disgust when he was informed of the court’s decision.

NOT THAT IT’S a surprise to see a judge place the law above political partisanship. It’s the way things are supposed to be, even though in this Age of Trump we have people who think that their partisanship is meant to prevail over all.

SOUTER: Often offended GOP pols

Anybody who pays attention to the Supreme Court knows there have been many justices who ruled on various cases in ways that went against the political desires of the presidents who appointed them.

Although I’m not ready to put Gorsuch in the same ranks as now-retired Justice David Souter. Remember the man appointed by former President George H.W. Bush whom his chief of staff, John Sununu, initially described as a “home run” for conservatism?

Souter wound up being a justice who aligned himself in his votes with the justices who were appointed to the court by former President Bill Clinton. He also was a justice who, in a case concerning abortion, wrote that doing anything to outlaw it would be, “a surrender to political pressure” and was amongst the court minority in 2000 who wanted to continue the recount of the presidential election ballots in Florida – when the act halting it is what gave us “President George W. Bush” instead of the man who nationally got more votes, Democrat Al Gore.

KAGAN: Wrote for the Ct majority

I’M SURE GORSUCH will come up with several votes on court cases that will appease the ideologues and Trump.

But like I wrote earlier, it is somewhat humorous to see Trump’s appointee be the guy who votes in a way that won’t appease the ideologues on immigration. Which is particularly odd in that this case originally came before the high court during the year that Republicans were thwarting Obama’s attempt to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia with Merrick Garland.

This same immigration case (based off the situation of a man from the Philippines who was found guilty of burglary in California) got a 4-4 vote then, which caused officials to want to re-argue the case with a full court – figuring that now they’d get a 5-4 vote in their favor.

Instead, they got a 5-4 vote against them, on the grounds that calling burglary a “crime of violence” was a bit of a stretch and that the law didn't really specify what a "crime of violence" was.

GORSUCH WOUND UP siding with the majority that let Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan (the old University of Chicago law school professor and an Obama appointee) write the opinion that will all up in arms in the near future about “too many foreigners” in this country.

TRUMP: Temper tantrum in Oval Office?

Personally, I think we have too many ideologues in this country. I also wonder if Kagan will be another reason for Trump to go on a "hate Chicago" diatribe. But those are issues for us to ponder another day.

Because you just know the ideologues will find something else to get all hot-and-bothered about. They usually always find something to get ticked off about, no matter what happens in "real" life.

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What will the chief justice do? Will ‘gay marriage’ issue set his legacy?

I’m starting to wonder about those justices of the Supreme Court of the United States who get appointed by presidents named “Bush.”

ROBERTS: Unpredictable?

Because they have the potential to be so unpredictable.

THERE WAS THE elder George Bush who gave the high court Justice David Souter (now retired). Bush was among a series of Republican presidents who were determined to load the court with conservative ideologues to ensure that certain policies were kept in place – even if the American people made the “mistake” of voting them out of office.

Souter’s interpretation of the law became one that wound up infuriating those same ideologues – who were more than willing to place blame on Bush, even if other appointments he made to the high court (Clarence Thomas, anyone?!?) were, are and always will be in line with their beliefs.

Now let’s move to the present, where we have Chief Justice John Roberts – who got his post from now-former President George Bush the younger.

Yet Roberts wound up being the justice who swung away from a predicted ideological leaning to give us the ruling that kept Barack Obama’s health care reform as federal law – and ensured that all the efforts by Congress to abolish it will be perceived as the leanings of ideological crackpots.

AND ON TUESDAY, Roberts took some actions that are being interpreted by some as ruining the desire of ideologues to have the high court knock down all this gay marriage “nonsense” – at least that’s how they perceive it.

Tuesday was the first of two days that the Supreme Court heard arguments concerning a California measure known as Proposition 8 – an attempt to cut off efforts to make marriage for gay couples legal by specifying that is most definitely illegal.

SOUTER: Predictability predecessor?

There were some attorneys arguing on behalf of those ideologues. Yet Roberts publicly questioned what legitimacy those people had in this legal proceeding. As though perhaps he thought they ought to just “pipe down” and let the real attorneys handle the legitimate issues involved in this case.

Admittedly, this is just one moment in this particular legal battle. It may not turn out to be a key point in this argument.

OR, IT MIGHT be over-interpretation on the part of some people to try to put a specific viewpoint into Roberts’ mind – and into creating a potential 5-4 vote of justices to strike down Proposition 8.

Instead of a 5-4 vote (Roberts, along with justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor) that upholds it. Although I suspect a real majority of the court wishes this issue were not before them, and they'd like to figure out a way to do as little as legally possible without appearing to be completely cowardly.

I’m not about to predict what the Supreme Court will do in ruling on this particular case – a ruling expected sometime in June. Legal issues at this level are just too unpredictable.

Although I’m pretty sure that if Roberts winds up being part of a Vote of 5 majority that enables marriage for gay couples, he will be well on his way toward demonization by the ideological right. Of course, those same ideologues will find someone else to rant about. That’s what they’re good at!

HE’LL PROBABLY BECOME more despised than Souter ever was. I wonder if he’d become despised as much as Earl Warren – the justice whose court in the 1960s that upheld much of the Civil Rights reforms wound up being the target of all those billboards throughout the South.

Will we get 21st Century take on these billboards?

“Impeach John Roberts!!!” Most likely from the very same people who absolutely want to believe that Obama wasn’t born in Honolulu back in 1961.

Some people are just determined to complain. And a part of me suspects that the reason they oppose gay marriage is because it gives legitimacy to another group of people they would prefer to rant about – thereby showing all the more how ridiculous their rants are.

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Are we really so clueless?

I recall a moment just over a decade ago when I was a reporter-type person at the Statehouse in Springpatch, covering one of the General Assembly’s partisan battles over the state budget.

What sticks in my mind is not anything said by the political types. But rather, a woman who showed up at the Statehouse, worked her way over to the space where the press corps worked, then started to berate me for the inadequate coverage given to the budget negotiations.

THIS WOMAN WANTED to know why there had never been any stories explaining what the actual budget figures would be. When I told her there had been, she insisted that the stories must have been buried on some obscure inside page.

When I produced two newspapers that played the story as their lead on their front pages (as I recall, I showed her the Chicago Tribune and the State Journal-Register of Springfield, but there were other papers that gave it the same treatment), she sputtered a bit, then stormed out.

How dare I contradict her view that the information was being buried away and was not easily accessible to anyone who was willing to plunk down a couple of quarters?

Better for her to believe that it is somehow someone else’s fault that she can’t get information about public policy issues, rather than her own for not being willing to look certain things up.

I COULDN’T HELP but remember this woman when I read the accounts of retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter’s speech this weekend to the American Bar Association (just envision attorneys from all over the country converging on Chicago).

He decried the lack of knowledge many people have about the basics of our government and civic policy organizations. It will likely be remembered (if at all) as the moment when he said many people don’t even understand the concept of the three branches of government.

To which one reader of the Chicago Tribune’s website seems to think means federal, state and local government. That is scary to read such confirmation in the reader comments section so quickly of Souter’s premise.

For it does not surprise me at all to think that there are people who don’t pay much attention to politicians who perform “the people’s business.”

I HAVE ALWAYS been aware during my time writing for wire services and newspapers that there are some people who only pay attention to the sports section, or the comics and horoscopes, or who used to use the classified advertisement sections when they needed to find a new apartment or car, or wanted to know where a garage sale was being held.

I’m even aware of the fact that some people have an ideological bent that causes them to believe they shouldn’t have to be all that interested in public policy and government.

After all, they’d rather believe they can live in isolation and not have to care what some political geek has to say about the issues.

But the fact is that we don’t live in isolation. And what I always thought was so interesting about writing about public policy issues was that I was writing about things that affected people.

THOSE TAX DOLLARS are being taken from your paycheck and distributed to all the various entities of federal, state and local government in your area.

It is the very least one can do as a part of our society to take an interest in how that money is being spent.

Note that I’m not saying you ought to run for office, or support a campaign, or tout any particular cause.

I’m just saying that you ought to have a clue what is happening around you.

YET SOUTER IS correct when he says that many of you don’t.

And that is scary because it creates an environment where the ideologues from both sides of the partisan spectrum can tout their heavily unbalanced attempt as fact to try to get their particular viewpoint peddled as THE sole acceptable viewpoint for government.

As Souter told the association, whom he expects to start touting the need for a greater awareness of public policy among the population, “a populace that has no inkling that the judicial branch has the job of policing the limitations of power within the constitutional scheme and no understanding that we are charged with making good on constitutional guarantees even for the most unpopular people in society (will give in to) cries to impeach judges who stand up for individual rights against the popular will.”

Information ultimately is what enables our society as a whole to be strong. I have always thought that those nations that go out of their way to restrict the flow of information among their people are ultimately shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to their own future advancement.

HOW FAR CAN one go forward if your people don’t know what is happening?

And as for those who seriously think the problem with “the media” is that it wastes so much time reporting “the news,” I can’t help but wonder what seriously goes through their minds.

Ultimately, the news and public policy and an understanding of government really is about having information and a comprehension about ourselves as a society.

What does it say about you if you’re an individual who thinks we as a people are uninteresting?

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