On January 31, 2017, Trump announced his selection of Judge Neil Gorsuch for the U.S. Supreme Court. Gorsuch is a conservative judge and one of the youngest nominee’s to the Supreme Court in a quarter of a century. He is nominated for the position that will replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who passed away almost a year ago.
Gorsuch currently sits on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals and was a former clerk to Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy. His educational background is impressive in that he attended Columbia, Harvard, and Oxford. An interesting fact is that Gorsuch was in the same graduating class at Harvard Law School as Obama. Additionally, although Gorsuch currently resides in Boulder, Colorado, he spent a considerable amount of time in D.C. as a child since his mother, Anne Gorsuch Buford, was the administrator of the EPA under Ronald Reagan.
Gorsuch appears to have a similar legal philosophy as Justice Scalia. In a speech he made at Case Western Reserve University School of Law he stated, “The great project of Justice Scalia’s career was to remind us of the differences between judges and legislators. To remind us that legislators may appeal to their own moral convictions and to claims about social utility to reshape the law as they think it should be in the future, ” he said. “But that judges should do none of these things in a democratic society.” Although we do not know how he will rule on many issues that may come before the Supreme Court, some speculate that his rulings will be similar to Scalia’s because of their similar legal philosophies.
Overall, Gorsuch will still have to be confirmed by the Senate. This could take a significant amount of time. The shortest wait pending historically was only 19 days and the longest was 108 days. Please check back for updates on the Supreme Court nomination in the following days.
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