Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the Constitution Center, writes that conservatives should rejoice — while liberals should fear — the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court.
From The Atlantic:
Neil Gorsuch, President Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, is one of the most respected conservative legal intellectuals on the federal bench. Like Justice Antonin Scalia, he has the ability and the ambition to lead America’s constitutional debate by following a clear vision of textualism and originalism, based on the premise that judges should separate their political from their constitutional conclusions.
But unlike the Hamiltonian Justice Scalia, the more Jeffersonian Gorsuch seems more willing to return to constitutional first principles and to question the constitutional underpinnings of the post-New Deal administrative state. At the same time, he clerked for Justice Anthony Kennedy and seems more likely than any other nominee to persuade Kennedy to vote with the conservatives rather than the liberals as long as he remains on the Court. And his record suggests a willingness to transform the law and to enforce constitutional limitations on the excesses of Congress and the president. For all of these reasons, Gorsuch’s appointment gives conservatives reason to celebrate, and liberals reason to fear, that Trump couldn’t have made a more effective choice.
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