Behind Neil Gorsuch’s Non-Answers
Having come of age in Alaska I take particular umbrage with Gorsuch’s dissent in the truck driver case - it demonstrates that he values property over life, and is willing to support draconian measures and decisions in favor of employers over employees. It’s morally wrong to insist that someone freeze to death rather than abandon property.
His background also includes a dose of pro-corporate, deregulatory libertarianism, as reflected in his close relationship with the billionaire Philip Anschutz, a client turned mentor. A sampling of authoritarianism can be seen in Gorsuch’s service in George W. Bush’s Justice Department, where he helped craft a proposal for the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo. (The Supreme Court later ruled it unconstitutional.) There’s social conservatism, too, evident in his one book, a critique of death-with-dignity laws and physician-assisted suicide. “All human beings are intrinsically valuable,” he wrote, “and the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.” It’s easy to read the book as a coded attack on abortion rights.
To the extent that Gorsuch said anything of substance at his hearing, he put himself across as a mainstream figure. He said that he had participated in some twenty-seven hundred cases on the appeals court, and had voted with the majority in ninety-nine per cent of them. This proves only that most cases are routine. (Even the Supreme Court issues unanimous rulings more than half the time.) The hard cases are the ones that matter, and it’s reasonable to project how Gorsuch would vote in them. He would oppose abortion rights. (Trump promised to appoint a “pro-life” Justice.) His predilection for employers over employees is such that it yielded a circuit-court opinion of almost Gothic cruelty. When subzero temperatures caused a truck driver’s trailer brakes to freeze, he pulled over to the side of the road. After waiting three hours for help to arrive, he began to lose feeling in his extremities, so he unhitched the cab from the trailer and drove to safety. His employer fired him for abandoning company property. The majority in the case called the dismissal unjustified, but Gorsuch said that the driver was in the wrong.