The Catholic Action League of Massachusetts today is hailing the decision of President Donald Trump to appoint Judge Neil Gorsuch, Associate Justice of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. President Trump announced his nomination of Gorsuch at 8pm this evening.
Judge Gorsuch, an Episcopalian, is, in the tradition of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, an originalist and a textualist in his approach to the Constitution. In a 2005 article in National Review, Gorsuch wrote that “American liberals have become addicted to the courtroom, relying on judges and lawyers, rather than elected leaders and the ballot box, as the primary means of effecting their social agenda.”
As an appeals court judge, Gorsuch has upheld, in the Hobby Lobby and Little Sisters of the Poor cases, the First Amendment guarantee of the Free Exercise of Religion, holding that the Affordable Care Act mandate for contraceptive, abortifacient and sterilization coverage in employee group insurance programs require employers to “violate their religious faith by forcing them to lend an impermissible degree of assistance to conduct their religion teaches to be gravely wrong.”
Prior to his 2006 appeals court appointment, Gorsuch authored a book opposing euthanasia and assisted suicide, in which he argued that “all human beings are intrinsically valuable and the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.” Early in his career, Gorsuch clerked for Supreme Court Justice Byron White, a Democrat and a JFK appointee, who wrote the dissenting opinion in Roe v. Wade.
The Catholic Action League commended President Trump for his “swift and faithful fulfillment of his campaign promise to appoint a like minded successor to Justice Scalia,” calling Judge Gorsuch “a jurist of integrity who respects both the rights guaranteed by the Constitution, and the restraints the Founders expected of the judicial branch.”
Catholic Action League Executive Director C. J. Doyle made the following comment: “The appointment of Neil Gorsuch represents a refreshing departure from the corrupt, bi-partisan tradition of appointing activist judges who think their office empowers them to impose their ideological preferences on the rest of society. It would seem that Judge Gorsuch actually believes that jurists ought to adhere to an honest reading of the Constitution, and be bound by that, rather than manipulate the language of the Constitution to invent rights which comport with their own social prejudices.”
“Liberals will, of course, declare Judge Gorsuch unfit to serve on the Supreme Court. For them, the only jurists qualified to serve on the court are those who give lip service to the fantasy that the Fourteenth Amendment—a document written in the eighteen sixties—contains a right to kill a child in the womb. Senate Republicans should move quickly to confirm the President’s nomination of Judge Gorsuch, using, if necessary, a simple majority vote.”
