Is Gorsuch a “Stealth Nominee?”

By Cliff Kincaid 

Originally published on April 3, 2017

When the first President Bush nominated David Souter for a seat on the Supreme Court, the nominee was sold to conservatives as a fellow conservative but turned out to be a solid member of the court’s liberal bloc. As such, Souter was labeled a “stealth nominee” to advance the liberal agenda. Could Judge Neil Gorsuch be another Souter?

On the surface, such a question seems absurd. Gorsuch was selected by President Donald Trump from a list of 21 “conservative” nominees assembled by the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, two respected conservative groups.

Like most conservatives, inside-the-beltway operative Matt Schlapp of the American Conservative Union fell in line behind the nominee. He called Gorsuch “a reliable defender of the Constitutional rights of every American” and a “self-described originalist who seeks to interpret the Constitution as the Founders intended.” Dr. Robert George of Princeton University said, “In selecting Gorsuch, President Trump has without question fulfilled his pledge to appoint a justice in the mold of Antonin Scalia—a conservative intellectual leader.”

But the hearings on Gorsuch’s nomination did produce controversial comments suggesting that, like Souter, he could turn out to be a member of the court’s liberal bloc on issues like gay marriage, abortion, and even gun rights.

Pro-life activist Mark Harrington of Created Equal said that he was troubled by the testimony Gorsuch gave during his confirmation hearings on abortion and homosexuality. “Words mean things,” he told AIM. He said “people weren’t listening or watching” if they missed the significance of these remarks by the nominee. In his opinion, he said it appears that Gorsuch “values precedent over the Constitution” given his remarks on abortion and gay marriage.

As the Constitution and history demonstrate, there were no abortion or gay marriage “rights” at the time of America’s founding. Those “rights” didn’t exist in America’s founding documents. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence affirmed, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

A product of elite liberal colleges and universities, Gorsuch strongly indicated during his confirmation hearings that the “rights” which now exist are those imposed on the nation by the Supreme Court. He attended Harvard Law School with former President Barack Obama, notes Politico.

At the same time, he expresses support for the right to life in his book, The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia. He is also considered a strong supporter of religious freedom rights.

While many conservative groups have endorsed Gorsuch, and liberal groups have opposed him, some reporters of a conservative bent have taken the time to follow the hearings and comment on what Gorsuch actually said. For example, Steve Jalsevac of LifeSiteNews analyzed his statements and observed, “…this man is NOT, as Trump has repeatedly been told, another Scalia,” the conservative justice who passed away last year and whose seat Gorsuch would fill.

Paul Bremmer of WorldNetDaily notes that Gorsuch, during his confirmation hearings, labeled as the “law of the land” or “settled law” the rulings on “unlimited abortion” and homosexual marriage.
Indeed, Gorsuch called the Supreme Court’s pro-abortion ruling, Roe v. Wade, “the law of the land,” and added, “I accept the law of the land.” That ruling led to the legalization of abortion on demand across the country, striking down state laws protecting the rights of the unborn.

His exact words were, “I would tell you that Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, is precedent of the United States Supreme Court. It has been reaffirmed…So a good judge will consider as precedent of the United States Supreme Court worthy as treatment of precedent like any other.”

“To me,” wrote Jalsevac, “there was something unnerving about how far he went in accepting the current realities of that horrendous decision that was based on lies and deliberate misinterpretation of the Constitution.”

Gorsuch called the same-sex “marriage” Obergefell v. Hodges ruling imposed on the states “absolutely settled law.” Jalsevac said, “That comment seemed to indicate Gorsuch is not a full constitutional originalist. No originalist would ever make such a comment that appears to betray the Constitution and the intentions of the Founders—considering the travesty of the Obergefell decision.”

Pro-life activist Mark Harrington told AIM that while the nominee’s statements were troubling, his remarks on homosexual marriage being “absolutely settled law,” based on a ruling made only eighteen months ago, were even more incomprehensible.

Scalia, a real “constitutional originalist,” had called the Court’s gay marriage decision a judicial “Putsch.” By that, he meant that the court had overthrown our democratic Republican form of government by creating rights that didn’t exist in the Constitution and which the people in all 50 states had not voted for.

In other little-noticed comments that emerged after the nomination was made or during the hearings, Gorsuch’s former law clerk, John Goodbaum, said Gorsuch was personally supportive of his “gay marriage,” while Gorsuch’s pastor, Susan Springer, was reported to have “proudly” attended the anti-Trump Women’s March in Denver, Colorado. The church he attends is “notably liberal,” The Washington Post reported. Reverend Springer is reported to be in favor of gay marriage and offers blessings to same-sex couples.

Mark Harrington of Created Equal had warned conservatives before the hearings to engage in “extreme vetting” of the nominee, and has since concluded that he can’t support Gorsuch.
He reminded conservatives, “President Reagan gave us Justice Kennedy. George H.W. Bush gave us Justice Souter. George W. Bush gave us Justice Roberts.”

History shows that Justice Anthony Kennedy authored the ruling legalizing same-sex marriage throughout the United States, while Chief Justice John Roberts gave us Supreme Court approval of Obamacare.

In the case of Souter, while many conservatives were fooled by White House assurances that he was a true conservative, the late conservative activist Howard Phillips had warned of Souter’s pro-abortion record and predicted he was going to be liberal on other social issues.
“We can’t get this one wrong,” Harrington said, referring to the pick of Scalia’s replacement. “We have no margin of error. Getting it wrong condemns millions of preborn children to death. This time around, we will trust but verify.”

Despite Gorsuch’s controversial remarks in his confirmation hearings, conservative activist Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network told CBS News that she is confident Gorsuch won’t be another Souter. Her group launched a $10 million campaign to support Gorsuch.

Some other columnists who have examined the record are not so sure. While Gorsuch “appears to have everything conservatives would want in a Supreme Court nominee,” New York Daily News columnist Adam Edelman notes that “there is a very thin paper trail when it comes to Gorsuch’s judicial rulings on key conservative issues like abortion and gun rights.”

In addition to the Souter case, Anthony Kennedy “had been seen by conservatives as a reliably right-leaning justice,” but over time came to be associated “with the court’s liberal bloc, becoming a critical swing vote on dozens of momentous decisions,” Edelman points out.

Gorsuch worked as a law clerk for Kennedy in the early 1990s. In his opening statement for his confirmation hearings, he said he “had the great fortune to clerk for Justice Kennedy” and that Kennedy “showed me that judges can disagree without being disagreeable.”

“Justice Scalia was a mentor, too,” Gorsuch said. “He reminded us that words matter. That the judge’s job is to follow the words that are in the law, not replace them with those that aren’t.”

But the words he uttered at the hearings about preserving the “rights” that have been made up by a liberal Supreme Court will continue to raise questions about whether he is a “Scalia clone,” as some liberals charge.

Will Gorsuch Fool Us Again?
by Cliff Kincaid 

Originally published on April 5, 2017

David French writes at National Review that the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade pro-abortion decision was morally and intellectually bankrupt, and has resulted in millions of children being “poisoned, stabbed, and dismembered.” So what will Judge Neil Gorsuch do to end this carnage?


Gorsuch has not ruled on an abortion case, but told the Senate during his confirmation hearings that the Court ruling is “the law of the land,” and “I accept the law of the land.”


My column, “Is Gorsuch a ‘Stealth Nominee?,” stands virtually alone in raising questions about these troubling statements from a conservative pro-life perspective. The conservative media are not raising the questions that they should about this nominee. They seem to have accepted the notion that President Donald Trump has nominated a true conservative, backed by the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, and that nothing more needs to be done or said, except to rubber-stamp his nomination.


He has said some things about the value of human life and religious freedom, but is it too much to ask and demand an answer to a simple question: Do you regard innocent unborn human beings as life worthy of life?


As a journalist and media critic, I am taught to demand answers. The issue is not ideology or perspective, but information. We knew the Left would reject any nominee from a Republican president. But the supposedly pro-life and conservative side seems content with his controversial comments in favor of “the law” and “precedent.” The status quo means more abortions.


From 1973 through 2011, according to available statistics, nearly 53 million legal abortions occurred in the U.S. At that rate, the U.S. is fast approaching the grotesque record of Mao Tse-tung, the communist Chinese leader who is still regarded as history’s greatest mass murderer. In America, of course, the abortions are done in the name of women’s rights and the “right to choose.”


“Our democracy has been corrupted to protect abortion charnel houses even from the most basic commonsense regulations,” notes David French. “The precedents and reasoning that created the abortion right have translated into a belief in a ‘living constitution’ that is so deeply embedded into the philosophy of the Left that it now believes that the Court can and should simply decide the correct outcome of any given case and then ‘find’ the right and reasoning in some combination of philosophy, law, precedent, and (sometimes) even selectively chosen foreign legal decisions.”


But has this reasoning been “imbedded” in Judge Gorsuch, a product of some of the same elite liberal academic institutions that produced Barack Obama, his nominees, and the “Living Constitution” nonsense?


Millions more unborn children have died since another Republican nominee, David Souter, was confirmed to the Supreme Court. Republicans had assured conservatives that Souter was a reliable conservative who would rule correctly on abortion and other issues. They were wrong, and we had reason to know they were wrong.


Jeremy Rabkin wrote a Weekly Standard article back in 1995 about how “the entire Washington conservative establishment” was fooled by Souter and his Republican handlers. He said Souter was “supported by conservative groups and unchallenged by conservatives inside the Bush White House.”


The late Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus saw through Souter and opposed his nomination. Rabkin sort of admitted this, saying, “Only one conservative organization, Howard Phillips’s Conservative Caucus, raised its voice in opposition to Souter at the time of the confirmation proceedings (and then solely on the basis of doubts about Souter’s personal views on abortion).” Actually, Phillips opposed Souter across the board, saying, “The overreaching moral issue in the political life of the United States in the last third of the 20th Century is, in my opinion, the question of abortion…If Judge Souter is confirmed as a Justice of the Supreme Court, he will, in all likelihood, be given the opportunity to address not only the issue of Roe v. Wade, but broader issues involving the sanctity of innocent human life.”


Rabkin wrote that Souter became “one of the staunchest liberals on the court—a more reliable champion of liberal causes than Clinton appointees Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.”


Phillips came to understand the risks associated with Souter by analyzing his record, as a member of the board of trustees of Concord Hospital in New Hampshire, when “he participated in a unanimous decision that abortions be performed at that hospital.” Phillips concluded, “Advocacy of, or even acquiescence in, such a decision is morally distinguishable from the judicial conclusion, profoundly incorrect, in my view, that women have a constitutional right to destroy their unborn children.”


The lobbying on behalf of Gorsuch has been similar to what we saw on behalf of Souter.


We are told that Gorsuch is like the late Justice Antonin Scalia. But Scalia was a staunch Catholic who attended a very conservative Catholic church. Gorsuch was raised Roman Catholic but left the church and became a member of the ultra-liberal St. John’s Episcopal Church in Boulder, Colorado, which has come to be known as Jeremiah Wright-lite, a reference to Obama’s longtime radical pastor.


Christian scholar Gary DeMar writes that this church is associated with a denomination, the Episcopal Church in the United States of America, that is liberal on many social issues, including abortion, same-sex marriage and “climate change.”


Its 48-page “Policy for Action” document  calls for “affirming reproductive choice,” which is code for abortion; more foreign aid; national health care; homosexual rights; support for the “Earth Charter;” and the licensing of purchasers of handguns.


On another hot button issue, the Episcopal Church believes in a “New Sanctuary Movement,” in order to shield illegal aliens from law enforcement; amnesty for illegals; and cheap college tuition for the so-called DREAMers.


Journalist Julia Duin, who previously wrote for The Washington Times, has brought up the issue of Gorsuch’s church membership, noting, “The Episcopal Church, for anyone who’s not been following religion trends in recent decades, has been careening to the theological and cultural left for years and its membership statistics show it.” She says the fact that the judge and his family have remained at St. John’s, rather than going to a more conservative church in the area, “says something,” and adds, “His church choice just may hint at certain leanings.”


It’s interesting that the Episcopal Church has a government relations website with a photo of the Supreme Court on it. Perhaps the church knows something about Gorsuch and his “leanings.”
But the American people don’t know, and apparently have no right to know.