Democrats: Trump ‘Stole’ Neil Gorsuch Seat from Obama

Democrats were seething Tuesday night over President Donald Trump’s decision to nominate Judge Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court, claiming that Trump “stole” the seat from President Barack Obama.

In a fundraising email, the Democratic National Committee said (original emphasis):

Judge Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump’s newly-revealed Supreme Court nominee, has a legal history that shows a deep sympathy for corporate interests and an apparent disdain for workers.

Donald wants to put Judge Gorsuch in the Supreme Court seat the GOP stole from President Obama. Add your name to tell the Senate to reject his nomination.

As an attorney, Judge Gorsuch routinely represented big businesses in class action lawsuits. As a judge on the Tenth Circuit, he wrote a concurring opinion in Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius — the case that allowed employers to deny basic health care coverage to women by ruling the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate was unconstitutional. He upheld a decision that denied long-term insurance benefits to a worker who sustained a work-related injury that required spinal surgery. He even dissented from a ruling in favor of a truck driver whose employer illegally fired him for abandoning a trailer with locked brakes — so he wouldn’t freeze to death.

And as a member of the ultra-conservative “Federalist Society,” Gorsuch believes in severely restricting the power that federal agencies like the EPA have to regulate businesses.

It’s not hard to see why Trump loves him so much — but from where we’re sitting, Joel, Judge Gorsuch has no business on the Supreme Court bench.

Republicans declined to move Obama’s nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, through the Senate, based on the principle — articulated by then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) decades before — that a Supreme Court Justice should not be confirmed in the last year of a lame duck administration.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. His new book, How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.