We are so excited and thank God for this day. This is the reason we elected President Trump. Let us pray for the safety and blessing of God upon Justice Neil Gorsuch!
Jim Bakker
Justice Neil Gorsuch sworn in as member of Supreme Court
Tag Archives: Supreme Court
Trump’s pick Gorsuch sworn in, restoring top court’s conservative tilt
By Lawrence Hurley
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Neil Gorsuch, picked by President Donald Trump and confirmed by the Republican-led Senate, was sworn in as a U.S. Supreme Court justice at the White House on Monday and was poised to have an instant impact on a court once again dominated by conservatives.
Trump earned the biggest political victory of his presidency and fulfilled a major campaign promise when the Senate voted on Friday to confirm the conservative federal appeals court judge from Colorado to the lifetime job despite vehement Democratic opposition. With Gorsuch aboard, the court once again has five conservative justices and four liberals.
Gorsuch took his judicial oath in a White House Rose Garden ceremony with Trump watching on, filling a vacancy that lingered for nearly 14 months after the death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016. The oath was administered by Justice Anthony Kennedy, for whom Gorsuch worked as a clerk as a young lawyer. Gorsuch will become the first justice to serve alongside a former boss.
All the other members of the court were at the ceremony, including liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who called Trump “a faker” last year during the presidential campaign but later said she regretted the remark. Trump at the time called on her to resign and said her “mind is shot.”
Scalia’s widow, Maureen, also attended the ceremony.
Gorsuch earlier in the day took his separate constitutional oath, administered by Chief Justice John Roberts, in a private ceremony at the Supreme Court with the other justices.
Trump made Gorsuch, 49, the youngest Supreme Court nominee since Republican President George H.W. Bush in 1991 selected Clarence Thomas, who was then 43. Gorsuch could be expected to serve for decades, and Trump could make further appointments to the high court to make it even more solidly conservative, with three of the eight justices 78 or older: Ginsburg, 84; fellow liberal Stephen Breyer, 78; and conservative swing vote Kennedy, 80.
Gorsuch will take part in the court’s next round of oral arguments, starting on April 17. They include a closely watched religious rights case on April 19 in which a Missouri church is objecting to being frozen out of state funds for a playground project due to a state ban on providing public money to religious organizations.
He is expected to take part in oral arguments in 13 cases during the court’s current term, which ends in June.
Gorsuch can be expected to have have an immediate impact of the court. He takes part on Thursday in the justices’ private conference to decide which cases to take up. Appeals are pending before the justices on expanding gun rights to include carrying concealed firearms in public, state voting restrictions that critics say are aimed at reducing minority turnout, and letting Christian business owners object on religious grounds to providing gay couples certain services.
Gorsuch could also play a vital role in some cases on which his new colleagues may have been split 4-4 along ideological lines and therefore did not yet decide. Those cases potentially could be reargued in the court’s next term, which starts in October.
Gorsuch’s wife, Louise, and his two daughters were also present at the private constitutional oath ceremony at the court, said Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg. Louise Gorsuch held a family Bible as her husband took the oath, Arberg said.
The Senate, which last year refused to consider Democratic former President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, voted 54-45 to confirm Gorsuch.
(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Will Dunham)
With ‘nuclear option,’ Senate ends Democratic blockade of Trump court pick
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)
Abortion rights activists rally at Texas Capitol against restrictions
By Jon Herskovitz
AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) – Hundreds of abortion rights activists rallied at the Texas Capitol on Wednesday, saying a raft of proposed legislation placing restrictions on the procedure in the most populous Republican-controlled state would endanger millions of women.
Lawmakers in Texas, which vaulted to the forefront of the national abortion debate when the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016 struck down a previous set of the state’s restrictions, are looking in the current session to pass bills that include a ban on a common form of second-trimester abortions.
Last month, the Texas Senate also approved a so-called wrongful birth bill. The measure shields doctors from lawsuits if they withhold information about potential fetal abnormalities if they believe the information may prompt the parents to seek an abortion. Supporters say the measure protects the sanctity of life.
Former Texas state Senator Wendy Davis, a Democrat who gained fame for her 2013 filibuster against the state’s abortion restrictions, told the rally that social conservatives have been emboldened by the election of Republican Donald Trump as president and “hell-bent” on holding women back.
“Now, we are facing the worst political attacks on women’s health in a generation,” she said on the Capitol steps in front of supporters holding pink signs reading “Don’t take away our care.”
Other proposed restrictions include a bill to halt insurance coverage for abortions and make women pay a separate premium if they wanted coverage. The bill won initial approval in the state Senate last month.
Supporters said the measure allows those who oppose abortion to prevent their money from subsidizing the procedure while critics said it would hurt poorer women who could not afford the coverage.
“Texas is one of the most active states in the current legislative session in terms of abortion restrictions,” said Elizabeth Nash, senior state issues associate for the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion rights group.
The Texas legislature meets once every two years and with the current session set to finish at the end of May, analysts are unsure how many of the restrictions might be enacted by the Republican-dominated body, where attention is now focused on passing a two-year budget.
Many at the rally were critical of the plans of national and state Republican leaders including calls to defund Planned Parenthood.
A U.S. judge in Austin issued a preliminary injunction in February halting Texas’ plan to cut Medicaid funding, saying the state did not present evidence of a program violation that would warrant termination.
(Editing by Matthew Lewis)
Called ‘dictator’, Venezuela leader tries to defuse court protests
By Girish Gupta and Andrew Cawthorne
CARACAS (Reuters) – Seeking to cool protests and international outrage, Venezuela’s socialist president said on Saturday the Supreme Court would review its move to annul the opposition-led congress, which critics decried as a lurch toward dictatorship.
“This controversy is over … the constitution has won,” Maduro said in a televised speech just after midnight.
He was flanked by senior officials on a specially-convened state security committee which ordered the top court to reconsider its rulings.
While Maduro, 54, sought to cast the move as the achievement of a statesman resolving a power conflict, his foes said it was a row-back by an unpopular government that overplayed its hand.
“You can’t pretend to just normalize the nation after carrying out a ‘coup’,” Julio Borges, leader of the National Assembly legislature, said. He publicly tore up the court rulings this week and refused to attend the security committee, which includes the heads of major institutions.
Having already shot down most congress measures since the opposition won control in 2015, the pro-Maduro Supreme Court went further on Wednesday with a ruling it was taking over the legislature’s functions because it was in “contempt” of the law.
That galvanized Venezuela’s demoralized and divided opposition coalition and brought a torrent of international condemnation and concern ranging from the United Nations and European Union to most major Latin American countries.
The decision to review the Supreme Court’s move – and presumably revoke the controversial ruling – may take the edge off protests, but Maduro’s opponents at home and abroad will seek to maintain the pressure.
They are furious that authorities thwarted a push for a referendum to recall Maduro last year and also postponed local elections scheduled for 2016.
Now they are calling for next year’s presidential election to be brought forward and the delayed local polls to be held, confident the ruling Socialist Party would lose.
“It’s time to mobilize!” student David Pernia, 29, said in western San Cristobal city, adding Venezuelans were fed up with autocratic rule and economic hardship. “Women don’t have food for their children, people don’t have medicines.”
FOREIGN PRESSURE
On Saturday, the National Assembly planned an open-air meeting in Caracas, while South America’s UNASUR bloc was to meet in Argentina with most of its members unhappy at Venezuela.
The hemispheric Organization of American States (OAS) had a special session slated for Monday in Washington.
Even before this week’s events, OAS head Luis Almagro had been pushing for Venezuela’s suspension, but he is unlikely to garner the two-thirds support needed in the 34-nation block despite hardening sentiment toward Maduro round the region.
Venezuela can still count on support from fellow leftist allies and other small nations grateful for subsidized oil dating from the 1999-2013 rule of late leader Hugo Chavez.
Maduro accuses the United States of orchestrating a campaign to oust him and said he had been subject this week to a “political, media and diplomatic lynching.”
Some criticism even came from within government, with Venezuela’s attorney general Luisa Ortega rebuking the court in an extremely rare show of dissent from a senior official.
“It constitutes a rupture of the constitutional order,” the 59-year-old said in a speech on state television on Friday.
Pockets of protesters had blocked roads, chanted slogans and waved banners saying “No To Dictatorship” around Venezuela on Friday, leading to some clashes with security forces.
Given past failures of opposition street protests, however, it is unlikely there will be mass support for a new wave. Rather, the opposition will be hoping ramped-up foreign pressure or a nudge from the powerful military may force Maduro into calling an early election.
He will be hoping to have ridden this week’s storm, and indeed there is no immediate threat to his grip on power.
The former bus driver, foreign minister and self-declared “son” of Chavez, was narrowly elected president in 2013.
But his ratings have plummeted as Venezuelans struggle with an unprecedented economic crisis including food and medicine shortages plus the world’s highest inflation.
Critics blame a failing socialist system, whereas the government says its enemies are waging an “economic war”. The fall in oil prices since mid-2014 has exacerbated the crisis.
The Supreme Court’s move this week may have been partly motivated by financial reasons. The wording about taking over Assembly functions came in a ruling allowing Maduro to create joint oil ventures without congress’ approval.
That may have its genesis in the urgent need to raise money from oil partners to pay $3 billion in bond maturities due this month, analysts and sources say.
The government, though, was probably also seeking to further disempower the opposition as it made headroads turning international opinion against Maduro.
During Chavez’s rule, the socialists were proud of their electoral legitimacy after winning votes over-and-over, so the increased questioning of their democratic credentials now stings and they have sought to stop some opposition leaders traveling.
(Additional reporting by Diego Ore, Eyanir Chinea and Deisy Buitrago in Caracas; Anggy Polanco in San Cristobal; editing by Alexander Smith)
Venezuela’s Maduro decried as ‘dictator’ after Congress annulled
By Diego Oré and Andrew Cawthorne
CARACAS (Reuters) – Opposition leaders branded Venezuela’s socialist President Nicolas Maduro a “dictator” on Thursday after the Supreme Court took over the functions of Congress and pushed a lengthy political standoff to new heights.
There was swift and widespread international condemnation of the de facto annulment of the National Assembly, where the opposition won a majority in late 2015 amid an unprecedented economic crisis that has seen Maduro’s popularity plummet.
The head of the 34-nation Organization of International States (OAS), Luis Almagro, said the Venezuelan court had dealt the final blows to democracy and accused Maduro’s “regime” of carrying out a “coup.”
Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Guatemala and Panama expressed strong concerns while Peru withdrew its envoy after what it termed a rupture of democracy.
The United States described the move as a “serious setback for democracy in Venezuela” while the European Union called for a “clear electoral calendar” going forward.
Venezuela’s top court had already overturned most National Assembly decisions since the opposition win. Then late on Wednesday, it explicitly stated it was assuming Congress’ role in a ruling authorizing Maduro to create oil joint ventures without the previously mandated congressional approval.
“As long as the situation of contempt in the National Assembly continues, this constitutional chamber guarantees congressional functions will be exercised by this chamber or another chosen organ,” the court said in its ruling.
The contempt charge stems from vote-buying accusations against three lawmakers from southern Amazonas state. Even though they no longer sit in Congress, the court said parliamentary leaders had not handled their case legally.
Critics of Maduro say it is an excuse for him to consolidate power and muzzle the opposition amid a severe recession, soaring inflation and acute shortages of food and medicine.
Maduro, a 54-year-old former bus driver and foreign minister, was narrowly elected in 2013 to replace late leftist President Hugo Chavez. He has accused Washington of leading a push to topple him as part of a wider offensive against leftist governments.
Stung by the rebukes around Latin America, Maduro’s government condemned what it described as a “right-wing regional pact” against it on Thursday.
“We reject the Peruvian government’s rude support for the violent and extremist sectors in Venezuela,” Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez said in a series of tweets.
Leaders of Venezuela’s Democratic Unity opposition coalition renewed their demand for early presidential elections and accused Maduro of duplicating Peruvian leader Alberto Fujimori’s notorious 1992 closure of Congress.
“Nicolas Maduro has carried out a ‘coup d’etat’ … this is a dictatorship,” said National Assembly President Julio Borges, before tearing up a copy of the Supreme Court ruling at a news conference in the gardens of the legislature.
“This is trash from people who have kidnapped the constitution, rights and freedom of Venezuelans … The National Assembly does not recognize the Supreme Court.”
PROTESTS
The opposition promised new street protests starting from Saturday – but that tactic has failed in the past despite marches that have drawn hundreds of thousands of protesters.
Last year, the opposition pushed for a referendum to recall Maduro and force a new presidential election, but authorities thwarted them and also postponed local electoral races that were supposed to have been held in 2016.
Maduro’s term in office ends in January 2019.
Around a dozen opposition lawmakers trying to march to the Supreme Court on Thursday clashed with National Guard soldiers and pro-government supporters lined up to stop them.
Pockets of youths took to the streets in parts of Caracas and attempted to block a major highway. They held flags and banners saying, “No to dictatorship.”
However, numbers were small and they quickly dispersed.
In 2014, a wave of unrest swept the country, leaving more than 40 dead, though now many opposed to the government say they feel protesting is pointless.
“If the international community stays firm, demanding elections, we are sure the government will have to turn back,” another opposition leader and two-time presidential candidate Henrique Capriles said.
Spooked by the opposition’s warning that investment deals bypassing Congress would not be valid, foreign oil companies were closely following the political showdown.
As Venezuela tries to raise funds for bond payments and a reeling economy, it has sought to sell stakes in oil fields. State oil company PDVSA recently offered Russia’s Rosneft a stake in the Petropiar oil joint venture, sources with knowledge of the proposal told Reuters.
“We want to make perfectly clear to all the oil companies that any strategic alliance (that did not go through Congress) is null,” Borges said on Thursday.
While some investors could see the Supreme Court sentence as giving them the green light to invest, others are increasingly worried about Venezuela’s murky legal framework.
“There is reasonable doubt about the legality of all this,” said a source at a foreign oil company.
(Additional reporting by Corina Pons, Eyanir Chinea, Andreina Aponte, Girish Gupta in Caracas, Mitra Taj in Lima, Rosalba O’Brien in Santiago and Enrique Pretel in San Jose; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne and Alexandra Ulmer; Editing by Tom Brown and Andrew Hay)
Virginia court rules for Trump in travel ban dispute, order still halted
By Mica Rosenberg
(Reuters) – A U.S. federal judge in Virginia ruled on Friday that President Donald Trump’s travel ban was justified, increasing the likelihood the measure will go before the Supreme Court as the decision took an opposing view to courts in Maryland and Hawaii that have halted the order.
U.S. District Court Judge Anthony Trenga rejected arguments by Muslim plaintiffs who claimed Trump’s March 6 executive order temporarily banning the entry of all refugees and travelers from six Muslim-majority countries was discriminatory.
The decision went against two previous court rulings that put an emergency halt to the order before it was set to take effect on March 16. The order remains halted.
Trump has said he plans to appeal those unfavorable rulings to the U.S. Supreme Court if needed, and differing opinions by lower courts give more grounds for the highest court to take up the case.
Trenga, an appointee of Republican President George W. Bush, said the complaint backed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim civil rights group, found that more than 20 individuals who brought the suit had been able to show they were harmed by the travel ban since they might be unable to reunite with their relatives.
But he also ruled that Trump’s revised order, which replaced a more sweeping version signed on Jan. 27 and rejected by courts, fell within the president’s authority to make decisions about immigration.
He said that since the order did not mention religion, the court could not look behind it at Trump’s statements about a “Muslim ban” to determine what was in the “drafter’s heart of hearts.”
Trump has said the ban is necessary to protect the country from terrorist attacks, but his first order was halted by a federal judge in Seattle and a U.S. appeals court in San Francisco due to concerns it violated the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition against religious bias.
“We’re confident that the president’s fully lawful and necessary action will ultimately be allowed to move forward through the rest of the court systems,” said White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer at a briefing.
CAIR said it would appeal the decision to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Lena Masri, CAIR’s national litigation director, said the 4th Circuit and the Supreme Court “are the judicial bodies that will ultimately decide whether the Constitution protects the rights of Muslim Americans.”
OTHER COURT ACTION
A ruling by U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson in Hawaii – an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama – put a stop to the two central sections of the revised ban that blocked travelers from six countries and refugees, while leaving other parts of the order in place.
U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang in Maryland, also an Obama appointee, only put a halt to the section on travelers.
The Virginia lawsuit sought to strike down the revised ban in its entirety.
Watson scheduled a hearing for Wednesday to decide whether his temporary order blocking the travel and refugee restrictions should be converted into a more formal preliminary injunction. The Justice Department has said it would oppose that bid.
The government has appealed Chuang’s decision in Maryland, also to the 4th circuit, and a hearing in that case is scheduled for May 8.
Other lawsuits against the ban continue to move forward around the country. Also on Friday, the Southern Poverty Law Center and other groups filed a new complaint in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. on behalf of Muslim community organizations.
(Reporting by Mica Rosenberg in New York; Additional reporting from Dan Levine in San Francisco; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
Supreme Court reins in president’s appointment powers
By Daniel Wiessner and Lawrence Hurley
(Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday put new restrictions on presidential powers, limiting a president’s authority to staff certain top government posts in a case involving an appointment to the National Labor Relations Board.
The court decided 6-2 to uphold a lower court’s ruling that then-President Barack Obama exceeded his legal authority with his temporary appointment of an NLRB general counsel in 2011.
In an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court said that under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, a person cannot serve as the acting head of a federal agency once the president nominates him or her to permanently serve in the role if it is a position that requires U.S. Senate confirmation.
SW General Inc, a Scottsdale, Arizona-based private ambulance company and a subsidiary of Envision Healthcare Holdings Inc <EVHC.N>, had challenged the makeup of the NLRB as it sought to invalidate a board ruling that said it violated federal labor law by discontinuing bonus payments for longtime employees.
The NLRB had argued that the law’s restriction applied only to politically appointed “first assistants” who are first in line for acting positions when the heads of agencies leave office, and not to other officials.
The ruling will give President Donald Trump and future presidents less flexibility in filling jobs that require Senate confirmation.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, saying the court ignored the fact that since the law governing vacancies was adopted in 1998, more than 100 people have served in acting roles while the U.S. Senate considered their nominations for permanent jobs.
The case focused on Obama’s appointment of Lafe Solomon as the NLRB’s acting general counsel to fill a vacancy in the job. The position requires Senate confirmation.
Obama nominated Solomon to fill the position permanently but also named him to fill in for former general counsel Ronald Meisburg, who resigned in 2010, in the interim while awaiting Senate action. Obama eventually withdrew Solomon’s nomination after it stalled for more than two years. The Senate ultimately confirmed Richard Griffin to the post in 2013.
SW General argued that Solomon should not have continued to fill the position on a temporary basis pending Senate confirmation, and the Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed.
The case is National Labor Relations Board v. SW General Inc, U.S. Supreme Court No. 15–1251.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Jonathan Oatis)
Democrats set to grill Trump’s Supreme Court nominee
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 vows to appeal against travel ban ruling to Supreme Court
By Dan Levine and Mica Rosenberg
HONOLULU/NEW YORK (Reuters) – A defiant Donald Trump has pledged to appeal against a federal judge’s order placing an immediate halt on his revised travel ban, describing the ruling as judicial overreach that made the United States look weak.
In granting the temporary restraining order in response to a lawsuit by the state of Hawaii, U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson found on Wednesday that “a reasonable, objective observer … would conclude that the executive order was issued with a purpose to disfavor a particular religion.”
Early on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang issued a nationwide preliminary injunction in a similar case in Maryland brought by refugee resettlement agencies represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Immigration Law Center.
Chuang ruled that the agencies were likely to succeed in proving that the travel ban portion of the executive order was intended to be a ban on Muslims and, as a result, violates the U.S. Constitution’s religious freedom protection.
“To avoid sowing seeds of division in our nation, upholding this fundamental constitutional principle at the core of our nation’s identity plainly serves a significant public interest,” Chuang wrote in his ruling.
The actions were the latest legal blow to the administration’s efforts to temporarily ban refugees as well as travelers from six predominantly Muslim countries. The president has said the ban is needed for national security.
However, the orders, while a victory for the plaintiffs, are only a first step and the government could ultimately win its underlying case. Watson and Chuang were appointed to the bench by former Democratic President Barack Obama.
Trump, speaking after the Hawaii ruling at a rally in Nashville, called his revised executive order a “watered-down version” of his first.
The president said he would take the case “as far as it needs to go,” including to the Supreme Court, in order to get a ruling that the ban is legal.
The likely next stop if the administration decides to contest the Hawaii judge’s ruling would be the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Three judges on the Ninth Circuit upheld a restraining order on the first travel ban issued by a Washington state judge.
At that point, the government’s legal options were to ask for a hearing by a larger panel of judges or petition the Supreme Court to hear the case. Instead, the administration withdrew the ban, promising to retool it in ways that would address the legal issues.
If the Ninth Circuit were to uphold the Hawaii court’s ruling, an appeal to the Supreme Court would be complicated by its current makeup of four conservative and four liberal judges, with no ninth justice since the death of Antonin Scalia more than a year ago.
The travel ban has deeply divided the country on liberal and conservative lines, and it is unlikely that a ninth Supreme Court justice would be seated in time to hear an appeal in this case.
Trump signed the new ban on March 6 in a bid to overcome legal problems with his January executive order, which caused chaos at airports and sparked mass protests before a Washington judge stopped its enforcement in February.
Watson’s order is only temporary until the broader arguments in the case can be heard. He set an expedited hearing schedule to determine if his ruling should be extended.
Trump’s first travel order was more sweeping than the second revised order. Like the current one, it barred citizens of Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen from entering the United States for 90 days, but it also included Iraq, which was subsequently taken off the list.
The revised ban also excluded legal permanent residents and existing visa holders and provided waivers for various categories of immigrants with ties to the United States.
Hawaii and other opponents of the ban claimed that the motivation behind it was Trump’s campaign promise of “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
In Washington state, a group of plaintiffs applying for immigrant visas asked U.S. District Judge James Robart in Seattle – who suspended the first ban – to stop the new order. Robart was appointed to the bench by Republican former President George W. Bush.
Judge Robart said he would issue a written ruling, but did not specify a time line.
(Reporting by Dan Levine in Honolulu, Mica Rosenberg in New York and Brendan O’Brien in Milwaukee; Writing by Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles; Editing by Toby Chopra)