Neil Gorsuch seems like a fine selection for the Supreme Court; I’ll leave the legal analysis to my more knowledgeable colleagues.
Within hours of the announcement, protesters were waving professionally printed signs (hmm!) denouncing him as “extreme and dangerous.”
Dangerous? I hope he proves dangerous to many things, such as the judicial habit of magically pulling out of whatever penumbra is available whatever any judge wishes to have discovered. I do not think that is what the protesters mean, though.
But, “extreme”?
Gorsuch sits on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. He was confirmed to that post unanimously.
If he is an “extremist,” then Senate Democrats confirmed a right-wing extremist to one of the nation’s highest courts without a single vote against him. Why would they do that?
Why would Senator Obama have done that?
The word “extremist” of course no longer means anything. It is something like what George Orwell said of “fascism.”
It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.
“Fascism,” he wrote, had come only to mean “something not desirable.”
I do sometimes wonder, sincerely, at what appears to me to be a genuine lack of self-respect on the Left. No one believes Chuck Schumer helped put a right-wing extremist on a federal court, and no one believes Gorsuch is an extremist. But the ritual incantation must be made, because that is what is demanded.
It gets very weird: Whatever else can be said of him, Donald Trump is more pro-gay than was Barack Obama when he was elected (Obama, remember, opposed gay marriage, based on, in his words, what “my faith tells me.”) But Democrat-affiliated gay groups denounce him as a monster even though he is closer to their position on gay-rights issues than any other man elected president has been. The streets are full of people protesting Trump’s attempt to restrict the travel of certain foreigners wishing to visit the United States — but these same people could not be moved when Barack Obama proposed stripping U.S. citizens of their constitutional rights with no trial, charge, or due process, and restricting their travel as part of a secret military-intelligence process. They cheered it, in fact, and said those who opposed this insane plan were soft on terrorism. President Obama went as far as ordering the assassination of U.S. citizens, and the Left became very angry with Chick-fil-A.
Perhaps our Democratic friends will pardon us if we do not take too seriously their insistence that Gorsuch is an “extremist.”
Perhaps they will pardon us if we do not take them too seriously about much of anything.