¡Sorpréndeme!

A particular theme of President Trump’s first days in office has been contempt for the judicial branch as a check on his authority: He criticized

2017-02-12 0 Dailymotion

A particular theme of President Trump’s first days in office has been contempt for the judicial branch as a check on his authority: He criticized
individual judges, preemptively blamed them for all future terrorist attacks and ridiculed the court system as “disgraceful.”
Given the administration’s disdain for the judiciary, any nominee to the Supreme Court, particularly
by this president, must be able to demonstrate independence from this president.
Of course, a judicial nominee should not prejudge how he or she would rule in a specific case to come before the court, but
that does not preclude the nominee from answering basic and specific questions about judicial philosophy or how he would have decided past cases.
As the conservative icon Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote, “Proof
that a justice’s mind at the time he joined the court was a complete tabula rasa in the area of constitutional adjudication would be evidence of lack of qualification, not lack of bias.”
Without any hints about his philosophy or examples of how he might have ruled on landmark cases, the only way
that Judge Gorsuch was able to demonstrate his independence as a jurist was by asserting it himself.
The bar is always high to achieve a seat on the Supreme Court,
but in these unusual times — when there is unprecedented stress on our system of checks and balances — the bar is even higher for Judge Neil M. Gorsuch to demonstrate independence.
The only way to demonstrate the independence necessary is for Judge Gorsuch to
answer specific questions about the judiciary and his judicial philosophy.