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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Neither ‘Justice Gorsuch’ concept, nor Donnelly's Dem vote, a surprise

We’re in a particularly partisan era of our society politically. We have a federal government that is determined to impose its will upon us all, and let the opposition know its irrelevance!
 

DONNELLY: One of 3 Dems to back Gorsuch

So anybody who thought there was a chance that Neil Gorsuch would be denied the Supreme Court position to which President Donald J. Trump appointed him was seriously kidding themselves.

THE ONLY REASON that the federal healthcare reform program imposed during the presidency of Barack Obama remains in place is because of the incompetence politically and socially of the current government leadership in Washington, D.C.

The will to do away with the Affordable Care Act was just as intense as it was to approve Gorsuch’s appointment. In fact, if anything, the failure to successfully repeal Obama’s health care reform only strengthened the resolve to ensure that the Senate approved the appointment to the high court.

Republicans were sick and tired of looking inept and incapable of governing. After all, what’s the point of having the White House AND complete control of Congress if you can’t strong-arm issues into public policy?

So it was inevitable that the Senate leadership would use their “nuclear” option to eliminate the rules that allowed an outspoken minority from preventing a final vote on Gorsuch’s appointment. It was also a “done deal” that when the issue came up Friday for a vote, the Republican majority in the Senate would approve him.

DEMOCRATIC OPPOSITION WOULDN’T matter in the least.

From the perspective of a political observer, the question I had was how many Democrats would wind up casting votes in favor of the appointment because they don’t want to give Republicans the opportunity to “tag” them as flaming liberals, subversives or whatever other cheap rhetoric the GOP dreams up for the 2018 election cycle.

It turns out three of the 46 Democrats wound up siding with the 51 Republicans who voted to approve Gorsuch (Johnny Isakson of Georgia was absent on Friday).

GORSUCH: That's 'Justice' Gorsuch now!!!

One of those three was Joseph Donnelly, a senator from Indiana (the South Bend area, specifically, and a guy who takes great pride in being a Notre Dame alumnus).

DONNELLY ISN’T EXACTLY a wild-eyed radical (although many GOPers do think that of everybody who isn’t in complete lock-step agreement with them). He’s certainly no Jan Schakowsky – as in the oft-outspoken Congresswoman from Evanston.

But he’s progressive enough on many issues, and he certainly has been willing to set foot in Chicago to take political support from Mayor Rahm Emanuel and campaign contributions from many of the same people who fund the political aspirations of our own state’s Democratic leadership.

So is Donnelly a sell-out?

Or is he just someone who’s thinking strategically about his vote. Knowing there’s no way his own caucus is going to be able to kill the Gorsuch appointment, he wound up siding with it so that a “no” vote on his part couldn’t become an issue to be used against him when he seeks re-election in the 2018 cycle.

IN FACT, THE Reuters wire service pointed out in their story that all three of the Democratic senators who voted for Gorsuch are up for re-election next year and come from states (Indiana, West Virginia and North Dakota) where Trump won the Electoral College in 2016.

There are those who think this kind of strategic action rings false. Politicians should vote what they think (or what they think their constituents think), rather than what they think will help their preservation. But it does happen.

 

OBAMA: Acted similarly on select issues

Let’s not forget Barack Obama from back when he was a U.S. senator from Illinois – his voting record includes an “aye” vote for a measure related to supporting construction of a wall along the U.S./Mexico border. For that matter, so does the record of Hillary Clinton when she was the junior senator from New York.

Does anybody believe either of them is in agreement with Trump on that issue, or any other? Nor does it lessen the impact that Gorsuch (who at age 49 becomes the first Supreme Court justice younger than myself) can potentially have if he chooses to put the “Trump” brand on the court and so many aspects of our society.

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Gorsuch nomination likely to be confirmed, but at what cost to U.S.?

I have no doubt that the U.S. Senate will wind up confirming the appointment by President Donald J. Trump of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court of the United States.
 

The image Dems want Gorsuch to be tainted with

Trump will get a political victory – and a BIG one! Influence over the direction the Supreme Court takes on legal issues for years to come; way much longer than the time during which Trump will actually serve as president.

MEANING I HAVEN’T concerned myself much with the tactics being used by the Democratic Party minority of the Senate to try to thwart a vacancy on the nation’s high court from being filled. It’s going to happen, no matter how much senators (including Illinois’ own Richard Durbin and Tammy Duckworth) oppose it.

There has been speculation that the Senate’s Republican leadership is prepared to use some hardball procedural tactics that could basically force the issue to be addressed – regardless of the opposition from Democrats.

But those people who think they’re being practical-minded by merely looking at the end result (Gorsuch assuming the position, so to speak, on the high court) are missing the point.

For the purpose of the opposition tactics, quite frankly, is to muck up the reputation of Gorsuch based on the circumstances to which he gained a position on the court. Make it so that any future actions he takes get tied in so intensely to the legacy of Donald Trump.

Some of this is payback for Garland rejection

MAKE IT SO that Gorsuch becomes nothing but a female dog to The Donald.

Which isn’t a nice or honorable way for Democrats to behave. I have no doubt it carries its share of a taint of sleaze.

But as Democrats, including Durbin, have made a point of stating, Gorsuch only got to have the appointment because of the partisan political games that were played last year by the Senate in refusing for nearly a year to consider the Supreme Court appointment of Merrick Garland.

He was the D.C.-based federal judge who then-President Barack Obama would have named to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

Durbin among those spewing partisan rhetoric

BUT REPUBLICAN IDEOLOGUES already were repulsed that Obama had been able to name two justices to the Supreme Court (Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan) and weren’t about to give him a third person.

The high court, after all, only has nine justices. Republican ideologues want to erase what they see as the taint Obama put on the federal government. Having a court with one-third of its picks chosen by Barack was totally unacceptable.

So Garland, a moderate pick from suburban Lincolnwood who was Obama’s attempt to appease more conservative interests, wound up becoming nothing. Gorsuch’s treatment, to a degree, is partisan political payback.

Duckworth efforts to meet Gorsuch ignored

But by making it clear that Gorsuch is a product of the Age of Trump (no matter what he really believes), they hope his name will be the subject of sneers and snickers similar to the way many in our society view Justice Clarence Thomas.

MORE THAN A quarter of a century after the confirmation hearings that resulted in the public airing of sexual harassment allegations, there are those who will never take anything he does seriously. Particularly because of the perception that Thomas was a pick of then-President George H.W. Bush who wanted a “certain kind” of black person on the high court who wouldn’t be as feisty as the legendary Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Time will tell if a “Justice Gorsuch” winds up being someone who can look beyond political partisanship while interpreting the law, or if he becomes so tied into the Trump image that we can never fully look at him seriously, or objectively.

GINSBURG: Now THAT will be a battle!

If anything, the real political battles will come if/when Trump gets to make Supreme Court appointments that would replace the justices perceived as not hostile toward progressive causes and issues.

Just think of how ugly the fight will be if Trump gets a chance to pick a replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who just turned 84 a few weeks ago). That will make the current brawl seem like a silly little spat, by comparison.

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