Thursday, February 02, 2017

What a shock! Trumps names a conservative to the court



Our politics is getting sillier by the minute. Democrats don’t show up for votes in the U.S. Senate. People are marching against a Supreme Court nominee before he is named.    
Let’s look at more silliness:
First, the New York Times beats the drums of “the stolen seat.”
Second, some Democrats are now saying that President Trump should not appoint a conservative judge because he is a plurality president. So was President Clinton and President Kennedy, but they put their people on the court.       
Neil Gorsuch comes on the scene at a time when Democrats have little power but very loud supporters. They’ve also been taking over by interest groups that only care about abortion, same-sex marriage, or men who want to use a woman’s bathroom. They’ve completely forgotten about the millions who live in the real world.
Judge Gorsuch was involved in a couple of recent issues that the Democrats will bring up in the confirmation hearings, as Ramesh Ponnoru wrote:    
 
In two high-profile religious-liberty cases, Gorsuch voted to hold that the Obama administration had violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act by refusing to exempt religious employers from a requirement to cover contraceptives in their insurance plans. In neither case, though, will it be easy for opponents to portray his decisions as evidence of social-conservative zealotry.
He concurred in a decision freeing the Hobby Lobby chain from the contraceptive mandate. Its Evangelical owners considered some of the contraceptives they were forced to cover to be abortifacients and objected to them for that reason. A narrow 5–4 majority of the Supreme Court affirmed that decision. 
Gorsuch joined a dissent arguing that the Little Sisters of the Poor, a group of Catholic nuns, had shown that the Obama administration’s fines for noncompliance with the mandate amounted to a substantial burden on the exercise of their faith — one of the preconditions for getting protection under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The Supreme Court unanimously vacated the decision from which Gorsuch had dissented. Gorsuch’s solicitude for religious liberty has not been confined to cases involving abortion, contraception, or conservative Christians. 
In the less well-known Yellowbear v. Lampert, Gorsuch ruled that the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act meant that a Native American prisoner had to have access to his prison’s sweat lodge.
Time will tell, as it always does. So far, I am pleased that Judge Gorsuch said last night that he believes that legislatures, not judges, write laws.    
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