Tag Archives: Neil Gorsuch

Trump set for first U.S. Supreme Court visit as justices weigh travel ban

FILE PHOTO: The Supreme Court is seen ahead of the Senate voting to confirm Judge Neil Gorsuch as an Associate Justice in Washington, DC, U.S. on April 7, 2017. REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein/File Photo

By Lawrence Hurley

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – For the first time since he was elected, President Donald Trump is set to attend the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday, presenting a potentially awkward moment as the court weighs what to do about his contentious executive order that attempts to restrict U.S. entry by people from six Muslim-majority countries.

Trump is scheduled to visit the ornate, marble-clad courthouse in Washington for the investiture of new Justice Neil Gorsuch, whose Senate confirmation in April was his first major accomplishment.

Attention will be focused on whether Trump, known for his off-the-cuff remarks and incendiary tweets, will follow the rules of an institution known for its courtesy and tradition.

The stakes are heightened by the fact that Trump’s so-called travel ban, one of his signature policies, is now before the justices after being blocked by lower courts.

The president is expected to sit in the courtroom during the brief ceremony in which Chief Justice John Roberts will administer the judicial oath to Gorsuch.

Trump is not expected to make a speech at the event, but he is likely to talk briefly to the justices beforehand in the court’s conference room, as other presidents have done in the past, according to a court spokeswoman.

In deciding whether to allow the travel ban to go into effect, the justices are set to weigh whether Trump’s harsh election campaign rhetoric can be used as evidence that the March 6 order was intended to discriminate against Muslims.

Trump has spoken out against courts blocking the ban and has also criticized his own lawyers. The court is currently considering an emergency request from the administration seeking to put its travel ban into effect while litigation continues.

Federal judges in Maryland and Hawaii blocked Trump’s 90-day ban on travelers from Libya, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. The Hawaii judge also blocked a 120-day ban on refugees entering the United States. The injunctions blocking the ban were upheld on appeal.

Trump’s appointment of conservative Gorsuch has been his most significant win since taking office in January.

Gorsuch, who has been sitting on the bench since April 10, restored the high court’s 5-4 conservative majority. There was a vacancy on the court for more than a year following the death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

(Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Lisa Shumaker)

U.S. top court’s Gorsuch says does not share ‘cynicism’ about government

FILE PHOTO: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch participates in taking a new family photo with his fellow justices at the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 1, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

By Nate Raymond

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (Reuters) – President Donald Trump’s U.S. Supreme Court appointee Neil Gorsuch said on Friday that he does not share what he acknowledged was currently “a lot of cynicism about government and the rule of law.”

Gorsuch, the newest member to the nation’s top court, spoke about the value of an independent judiciary during an evening event at Harvard University that also featured fellow Justice Stephen Breyer.

Gorsuch reflected on how the “government can lose in its own courts and accept the judgement of those courts without an army to back it up.”

He said 95 percent of all U.S. cases are resolved at the trial court level, with few reaching the appellate level or Supreme Court, a fact that he said indicated that litigants were satisfied that justice had been done.

“I know a lot of cynicism about government and the rule of law, but I don’t share it,” he said.

Gorsuch, whose confirmation to the lifetime job restored the court’s conservative majority following Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February 2016, formally joined the Supreme Court on April 10.

Gorsuch served on the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals before Trump nominated him in January. Trump was able to fill the vacancy after Senate Republicans last year refused to consider President Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland.

Breyer, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, and is a member of the liberal wing of the nine-member court, stressed during his comments the value of international values.

“The values you are talking about are very widespread across the world,” he said. “Interest in democracy, human rights and so forth and rule of law.”

(Reporting by Nate Raymond; Editing by Kim Coghill)

Trump travel ban fight heads toward Supreme Court showdown

A picture of the travel advisory page of Qatar Airways advising passengers bound for the United States from seven newly banned majority Muslim countries that they need to have either a U.S. green card or diplomatic visa, January 28, 2017 in London, Britain. Picture taken January 28, 2017. REUTERS/Russell Boyce

By Lawrence Hurley

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The fate of President Donald Trump’s order to ban travelers from six predominantly Muslim nations, blocked by federal courts, may soon be in the hands of the conservative-majority Supreme Court, where his appointee Neil Gorsuch could help settle the matter.

After the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined on Thursday to lift a Maryland federal judge’s injunction halting the temporary ban ordered by Trump on March 6, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the administration would appeal to the Supreme Court.

A second regional federal appeals court heard arguments on May 15 in Seattle in the administration’s appeal of a decision by a federal judge in Hawaii also to block the ban. A ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is pending.

The Justice Department has not made clear when the administration would make its formal appeal or whether it would wait for the 9th Circuit ruling before appealing.

If they take it up, the justices would be called upon to decide whether courts should always defer to the president over allowing certain people to enter the country, especially when national security is the stated reason for an action as in this case. They also would have to decide if Trump’s order violated the U.S. Constitution’s bar against the government favoring one religion over another, as the ban’s challengers assert.

Gorsuch’s April confirmation by the Republican-led Senate over Democratic opposition restored the court’s 5-4 majority, which means that if all the conservative justices side with the administration the ban would be restored regardless of how the four liberal justices vote.

During his Senate confirmation hearing, Gorsuch was questioned about Trump’s criticism of judges who ruled against the ban. Gorsuch avoided commenting on the legal issue, saying only that he would not be “rubber stamp” for any president.

While the justices could decide in the coming weeks whether to hear the case, they likely would not hold oral arguments until late in the year, with a ruling sometime after that. A final resolution may not come until perhaps a year after Trump issued the executive order.

The justices are not required to hear any case, but this one meets important criteria cited by experts, including that it would be the federal government filing the appeal and that it involves a nationwide injunction.

The administration could file an emergency application seeking to put the order into effect while the litigation on its legality continues. At least five justices must agree for any such request to be granted.

While the court could split 5-4 along ideological lines, it also is possible some conservative justices could join the liberals in overturning the travel ban, libertarian law professor Ilya Somin of George Mason University said.

“Conservatives in other contexts often take a hard line against any kind of government discrimination (based) on race or religion or the like, even if the motivation may be benign. Also conservatives have concerns about government infringements on religion,” Somin said.

The 4th Circuit said the ban’s challengers, including refugee groups, in the case argued by the American Civil Liberties Union were likely to succeed on their claim that the order violated the Constitution’s prohibition on the government favoring or disfavoring any religion. In the 10-3 ruling, three Republican-appointed judges dissented.

The Republican president’s March 6 order, replacing an earlier Jan. 27 one also blocked by the courts, called for barring people from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen for 90 days while the government implements stricter visa screening. It also called for suspending all refugee admissions for 120 days.

KENNEDY’S REASONING

The travel ban’s challengers may take some comfort from the appeals court ruling’s reliance on a concurring opinion in a 2015 Supreme Court immigration case by Justice Anthony Kennedy, a conservative who sometimes sides with the court’s liberals in big cases.

In the 2015 case, Kennedy wrote that in the immigration context, the government’s actions can be questioned if there is evidence of bad faith.

“As with any opinion by Justice Kennedy, I think the million-dollar question is just what he meant in his concurrence, and this may be a perfect case to find out,” University of Texas School of Law professor Stephen Vladeck said.

In Thursday’s ruling, 4th Circuit Chief Judge Roger Gregory wrote that the plaintiffs had shown there was “ample evidence” of bad faith, which gave the green light to probe whether there were reasons for the order other than the administration’s stated national security rationale.

The administration has argued the temporary travel ban was needed to guard against terrorist attacks. Gregory wrote that the order uses “vague words of national security, but in context drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination.” Trump during the presidential campaign called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Additional reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)

With ‘nuclear option,’ Senate ends Democratic blockade of Trump court pick

FILE PHOTO - U.S. Supreme Court nominee judge Neil Gorsuch testifies during a third day of his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., March 22, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo

By Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Senate Republicans on Thursday crushed a Democratic blockade of President Donald Trump’s U.S. Supreme Court nominee in a fierce partisan brawl, approving a rule change dubbed the “nuclear option” to allow for conservative judge Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation by Friday.

With ideological control of the nation’s highest court at stake, the Republican-led Senate voted 52-48 along party lines to change its long-standing rules in order to prohibit a procedural tactic called a filibuster against Supreme Court nominees. That came after Republicans failed by a 55-45 tally to muster the 60-vote super-majority needed to end the Democratic filibuster that had sought to deny Gorsuch confirmation to the lifetime post.

The Senate’s action paved the way to confirm Gorsuch by simple majority, with a vote expected at roughly 7 p.m. (2399 GMT) on Friday. Republicans control the Senate 52-48. The rule change was called the “nuclear option” because it was considered an extreme break with Senate tradition.

Trump had encouraged Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to “go nuclear.” Confirmation of Gorsuch would represent Trump’s first major victory since taking office on Jan. 20, after setbacks on healthcare legislation and his blocked order to prevent people from several Muslim-majority nations from entering the United States.

“This will be the first and last partisan filibuster of the Supreme Court,” McConnell said on the Senate floor, accusing Democrats of trying to inflict political damage on Trump and to keep more conservatives from joining the high court.

“In 20 or 30 or 40 years, we will sadly point to today as a turning point in the history of the Senate and the Supreme Court, a day when we irrevocably moved further away from the principles our founders intended for these institutions: principles of bipartisanship, moderation and consensus,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor.

Schumer ridiculed McConnell’s contention that the Democratic action was unprecedented, noting that the Republican-led Senate last year refused to consider Democratic former President Barack Obama’s nomination of appellate judge Merrick Garland for the same high court seat that Trump selected Gorsuch to fill.

Senate confirmation of Gorsuch, 49, would restore the nine-seat court’s 5-4 conservative majority, enable Trump to leave an indelible mark on America’s highest judicial body and fulfill a top campaign promise by the Republican president. Gorsuch could be expected to serve for decades.

A conservative-majority court is more likely to support gun rights, an expansive view of religious liberty, abortion regulations and Republican-backed voting restrictions, while opposing curbs on political spending. The court also is likely to tackle transgender rights and union funding in coming years.

THREE DEMOCRATS

In the end, three Democratic senators up for re-election in 2018 in states won by Trump last year – Indiana’s Joe Donnelly, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp – broke with their party and voted with Republicans to bring about a confirmation vote, though they opposed the rule change.

The nine-seat Supreme Court has had a vacancy since conservative Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016.

Republicans have called Gorsuch superbly qualified and one of the nation’s most distinguished appellate judges, and they blamed Democrats for politicizing the confirmation process.

Democrats accused Gorsuch of being so conservative as to be outside the judicial mainstream, favoring corporate interests over ordinary Americans in legal opinions, and displaying insufficient independence from Trump.

The 60-vote threshold that gives the minority party power to hold up the majority party has forced the Senate over the decades to try to achieve bipartisanship in legislation and presidential appointments.

What Republicans did to Obama’s nominee Garland was worse than a filibuster, Schumer said. Schumer said Republicans denied “the constitutional prerogative of a president with 11 months left in his term.”

“The nuclear option was used by Senator McConnell when he stopped Merrick Garland. What we face today is the fallout,” Democratic Senator Richard Durbin added on the Senate floor.

McConnell blamed the escalation of fights over judicial nominees on the Democrats and their opposition starting three decades ago to nominees made by Republican former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

McConnell called the Democratic effort against Gorsuch “another extreme escalation in the left’s never-ending drive to politicize the court and the confirmation process.” He accused Gorsuch’s opponents of “a singular aim: securing raw power no matter the cost to the country or the institution.”

Experts said eliminating the filibuster for Supreme Court appointments could make it more likely that presidents, with little incentive to choose centrist justices who could attract support from the other party, will pick ideologically extreme nominees in the future.

Ending the filibuster also would make it easier for future Supreme Court nominees to be confirmed when the president and Senate leadership belong to the same party.

The filibuster in one form or another dates back to the 19th century but assumed its current form in the 1970s.

While Democrats opposed the rule change and accused Republicans of a power grab, it was their party that first resorted to the nuclear option when they controlled the Senate in 2013. In the face of Republican filibusters of Obama appointments, they barred filibusters for executive branch nominees and federal judges aside from Supreme Court justices but still allowed it for Supreme Court nominees and legislation.

The Republican-backed rule change maintains the ability to filibuster legislation.

(Reporting by Richard Cowan, Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham)

Democrats set to grill Trump’s Supreme Court nominee

U.S. Supreme Court nominee judge Neil Gorsuch is sworn in to testify at his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., March 20, 2017. REUTERS/James Lawler Duggan

By Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch faces a grueling day of questioning from Democrats on Tuesday on how he might rule on contentious social issues like abortion and whether he is sufficiently independent from the man who picked him, President Donald Trump.

With the ideological balance of the Supreme Court at stake, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold the second day of its confirmation hearing for Gorsuch, a conservative federal appeals court judge from Colorado. Republicans, who control Congress, have praised Gorsuch, 49, as highly qualified for a lifetime appointment as a justice.

Gorsuch appeared genial and composed on Monday in delivering his opening statement, but Tuesday’s questioning by committee members of both parties could cause more drama. Despite slim chances of blocking his nomination in the Republican-led Senate, Democrats have raised questions about Gorsuch’s suitability for the job.

In his opening statement to the panel on Monday, his first public remarks since Trump nominated him on Jan. 31, Gorsuch defended his judicial record, emphasizing the need for “neutral and independent judges to apply the law.”

Democrats outlined their lines of attack in their opening statements on Monday, with some senators saying they would press him on whether he is independent enough from Trump, who has condemned federal judges who have put on hold his two executive orders to ban the entry into the United States of people from several Muslim-majority countries.

Gorsuch will also face questioning over cases he has handled on the appeals court in which corporate interests won out over individual workers.

Dianne Feinstein, the senior Democrat on the committee, said she wanted assurances that Gorsuch would not seek to overturn the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 case Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in the United States. She and other Democrats are also expected to question Gorsuch on whether he would support gun restrictions, campaign finance laws and environmental regulations.

Like past Supreme Court nominees, Gorsuch will face the task of giving little away about how he might rule in future cases while endeavoring to engage with senators.

Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican chairing the Senate panel, said the committee is likely to vote on the nomination on April 3, with the full Senate vote likely soon after. The hearing could last four days.

If Gorsuch is confirmed by the Senate, as expected, he would restore a narrow 5-4 conservative court majority. The seat has been vacant for 13 months, since the death of conservative justice Antonin Scalia.

The court’s ideological leaning could help determine the outcome of cases involving the death penalty, abortion, gun control, environmental regulations, transgender rights, voting rights, immigration, religious liberty, presidential powers and more.

Republicans hold 52 of the Senate’s 100 seats. Under present rules, Gorsuch would need 60 votes to secure confirmation. If Gorsuch cannot muster 60, Republicans could change the rules to allow confirmation by a simple majority.

Click http://tmsnrt.rs/2nANgEj for graphic on Confirming Gorsuch

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Will Dunham)

Trump picks conservative judge Gorsuch for U.S. Supreme Court

By Lawrence Hurley and Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump on Tuesday nominated Neil Gorsuch for a lifetime job on the U.S. Supreme Court, picking the 49-year-old federal appeals court judge to restore the court’s conservative majority and help shape rulings on divisive issues such as abortion, gun control, the death penalty and religious rights.

The Colorado native faces a potentially contentious confirmation battle in the U.S. Senate after Republicans last year refused to consider Democratic President Barack Obama’s nominee to fill the vacancy caused by the February 2016 death of conservative justice Antonin Scalia.

Gorsuch is the youngest nominee to the nation’s highest court in more than a quarter century, and he could influence the direction of the court for decades.

Announcing the selection at the White House flanked by the judge and his wife, Trump said Gorsuch’s resume is “as good as it gets.” Trump said he hopes Republicans and Democrats can come together on this nomination for the good of the country.

“Judge Gorsuch has outstanding legal skills, a brilliant mind, tremendous disciple, and has earned bipartisan support,” Trump said.

“Depending on their age, a justice can be active for 50 years. And his or her decisions can last a century or more, and can often be permanent,” Trump added.

Gorsuch is a judge on the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and was appointed to that post by Republican President George W. Bush in 2006.

Some Democrats in the U.S. Senate, which votes on whether to confirm judicial nominees, have already said they would seek to block whoever Trump nominates.

Gorsuch is considered a conservative intellectual, known for backing religious rights, and is seen as very much in the mold of Scalia, a leading conservative voice on the court for decades.

“I respect … the fact that in our legal order it is for Congress and not the courts to write new laws,” Gorsuch said, as Trump looked on. “It is the role of judges to apply, not alter, the work of the people’s representatives. A judge who likes every outcome he reaches is very likely a bad judge, stretching for results he prefers rather than those the law demands.”

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the choice of Gorsuch was seen by the White House as a significant departure from Supreme Court nominations from the recent past, given that many justices have come from the eastern United States. Gorsuch lives in Boulder, Colorado, where he raises horses and is a life-long outdoorsman.

The official described Gorsuch as a mainstream judge who should easily be confirmed by the Senate. The official noted that the Senate confirmed him for his current judgeship in 2006 by voice vote with no one voting against him.

Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy said that “the Senate owes the American people a thorough and unsparing examination of this nomination,” saying Trump “outsourced this process to far-right interest groups.”

The liberal advocacy group People for the American Way immediately opposed the nomination, with its president, Michael Keegan, describing Gorsuch as an “ideological warrior who puts his own right-wing politics above the Constitution.”

The administration official said the White House feels Gorsuch has the qualities that Democratic senators said they wanted to see in a justice during visits with senior Trump officials about filling the vacancy.

“He plays it straight. He sticks to principles, and his opinions reflect a consistency regardless of who is in his courtroom,” the official said of Gorsuch.

Trump made his choice between two U.S. appeals court judges, Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman of the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, according to a source involved in the selection process.

Gorsuch became the youngest U.S. Supreme Court nominee since Republican President George H.W. Bush in 1991 selected conservative Clarence Thomas, who was 43 at the time.

He is the son of Anne Burford, the first woman to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. She served in Republican President Ronald Reagan’s administration but resigned in 1983 amid a fight with Congress over documents on the EPA’s use of a fund created to clean up toxic waste dumps nationwide.

Trump’s selection was one of the most consequential appointments of his young presidency as he moved to restore a conservative majority on the Supreme Court that had been in place for decades until Scalia died at age 79 on Feb. 13, 2016.

Trump, who took office on Jan. 20, got the opportunity to name Scalia’s replacement only because the Republican-led U.S. Senate, in an action with little precedent in U.S. history, refused to consider Obama’s nominee for the post, appeals court judge Merrick Garland. Obama nominated Garland on March 16 but Republican senators led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell denied Garland the customary confirmation hearings and vote.

Trump has said his promise to appoint a conservative justice was one of the reasons he won the Nov. 8 presidential election, with Christian conservatives and others emphasizing the importance of the pick during the campaign. Trump last week said evangelical Christians would love his nominee.

Trump’s fellow Republicans hold a 52-48 majority in the Senate. The minority Democrats, irate over Garland’s rebuff, potentially could try to block the nomination with procedural hurdles.

The new appointee would expand the court’s conservative wing, made up of John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Kennedy long has been considered the court’s pivotal vote, sometimes siding with the liberals in key cases such as the June 2016 ruling striking down abortion restrictions in Texas.

The court’s restored conservative majority likely would be supportive toward the death penalty and gun rights and hostile toward campaign finance limits. Scalia’s replacement also could be pivotal in cases involving abortion, religious rights, presidential powers, transgender rights, voting rights, federal regulations others.

Gorsuch has strong academic qualifications, with an Ivy League education: attending Columbia University and, like several of the other justices on the court, Harvard Law School. He also completed a doctorate in legal philosophy at Oxford University, spent several years in private practice and worked in George W. Bush’s Justice Department.

Gorsuch joined an opinion in 2013 saying that owners of private companies could object on religious grounds to a provision of the Obamacare health insurance law requiring employers to provide coverage for birth control for women.

As long as Kennedy and four liberals remain on the bench, the court is not expected to pare back abortion rights as many U.S. conservatives fervently hope. The Supreme Court legalized abortion in the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. In June, the justices ruled 5-3 to strike down a Texas law that restricted abortion access, with Kennedy and the liberals in the majority.

The current vacancy is the court’s longest since a 391-day void from 1969 to 1970 during Republican Richard Nixon’s presidency. After Abe Fortas resigned from the court in May 1969, the Senate voted down two nominees put forward by Nixon before confirming Harry Blackmun, who became a justice in June 1970. Aside from that one, no other Supreme Court vacancy since the U.S. Civil War years of the 1860s has been as long as the current one.

Some Democrats have threatened to pursue a procedural hurdle called a filibuster, meaning 60 votes would be needed in the 100-seat Senate unless its long-standing rules are changed. Trump’s fellow Republicans hold a 52-48 majority, meaning some Democratic votes would be needed to confirm his pick.

Trump said last week he would favor Senate Republicans eliminating the filibuster, a change dubbed the “nuclear option,” for Supreme Court nominees if Democrats block his pick.

Trump during his presidency may get to make additional appointments to the Supreme Court. Liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who Trump called upon to resign last July after she called him “a faker,” is 83 while Kennedy is 80. Stephen Breyer, another liberal, is 78.

If any of those three is replaced by a Trump appointee, conservatives would be eager to bring cases challenging the Roe v. Wade ruling in the hope it would be overturned, long a goal for many Christian conservatives.

(Additional reporting by Andrew Chung, Richard Cowan, Susan Heavey, Ayesha Rascoe and Doina Chiacu; Writing by Alistair Bell and Will Dunham; Editing by Bill Trott and Peter Cooney)