Wednesday round-up
on Feb 15, 2017 at 7:01 am
At Roll Call, Todd Ruger reports on Judge Neil Gorsuch’s Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire, noting that “some portions” were “apparently copied and pasted from a similar questionnaire from a decade ago, when the Senate confirmed him on a voice vote to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit.” In The New York Times, Matt Flegenheimer reports that the Gorsuch confirmation process poses a “dilemma” for Senate Democrats, who are being forced “into disparate factions over a nominee with copious credentials but deeply conservative roots.” In The Hill, Jordain Carney reports that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has stated that Democratic senators “should apply the ‘Ginsburg standard,’” derived from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s statement during her confirmation hearings that she would provide “’no forecast, no hints’” of her positions in specific cases, to the Gorsuch nomination, arguing that “Democrats like Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) are setting a higher bar for Gorsuch.” In The Washington Times, Alex Swoyer reports that Schumer “is poised to be the biggest hurdle between Judge Neil Gorsuch and the Supreme Court.”
At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman analyzes the language in Gorsuch’s opinions on the 10th Circuit, identifying “five of Judge Gorsuch’s more liberal written decisions and five of his most conservative decisions according to the opinions’ wordings.” At JD Supra Business Advisor, Lindsay DiSalvo concludes that “employers will likely benefit from Judge Gorsuch’s confirmation if it should proceed.” At Crain’s Cleveland Business, Andrew Moses describes Gorsuch’s “consistent reluctance to second-guess employer decisions” and his “common-sense approach to evaluating the merits of a claim” that, more “often than not, … has benefited employers.” At UtilityDIVE, Robert Walton observes “that Gorsuch lacks a large body of specific energy- or environment-specific cases, but is expected to be very conservative.” And at The Huffington Post, Alexander Kaufman focuses on the effect Gorsuch’s desire to reduce judicial deference to agency interpretations of federal laws would have on environmental law, noting that environmental groups argue that “undoing Chevron deference would cripple the federal government’s ability to enforce rules against pollution,” because “EPA regulations are based on extensive analysis of science to inform the legal standards set by Congress.”
In an op-ed in Forbes, Evan Young, a law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, considers Judge Neil Gorsuch “a worthy heir to Justice Scalia,” suggesting that the late justice “would have been thrilled that the next occupant of his seat will be someone who will spend the next 30, 40 or even … 50 years building on Justice Scalia’s jurisprudential foundations, rather than working to tear them down.” In the National Review, Roger Clegg asserts that Gorsuch’s willingness to criticize President Donald Trump’s remarks about judges and the judiciary is a prime example of “’speaking truth to power.’”
In Slate, Mark Joseph Stern discusses a recent speech by Justice Samuel Alito in which Alito criticized Chevron deference in environmental cases, arguing that “embedded in his fulmination against climate science is a legitimately confused and contradictory legal stance that suggests that, for Alito, the only valid regulations are the ones he agrees with.” In an op-ed in The Washington Post, Tom Toles also takes aim at Alito’s remarks.
Briefly:
- In the National Review, Ryan Walsh, another former Scalia clerk, recalls the late justice on the first anniversary of his death, listing “five life lessons” Scalia taught him “that have stayed with me.”
- At Casetext, David Boyle argues that current events show “that this may not be a good time for the Supreme Court in Lee v. Tam to allow the trademarking of stereotypical slurs or other hateful terms.”
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