For all that President Trump fulminates and feuds over the border wall, Obamacare replacement, and a laundry list of promises that stagnated and died in the House and Senate alike, he’s quietly remade the federal judiciary into an increasingly impenetrable gem of originalism.
Two years after his confirmation and more than halfway through Trump’s term, the appointment of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch stands as the crowning achievement of the Trump administration.
Given the Merrick Garland debacle, Democrats have refused to view Gorsuch as a legitimate justice. Despite this, Gorsuch has ruled as much as an arbiter of natural law jurisprudence with Clarence Thomas as he has a civil libertarian on criminal justice with Sonia Sotomayor. He hasn’t just issued standard-issue rulings to benefit Trump, but rather he has built upon the legacy of Antonin Scalia to become one of the most prolific originalists in a generation.
Of course, partisans can’t help themselves. Gorsuch recently found himself under fire for his ruling in Bucklew v. Precythe. Ian Millhiser predictably deemed Gorsuch’s opinion “bloodthirsty,” with the overwhelming media narrative shaping up as Gorsuch denying an inmate on death row a painless execution out of sheer cruelty. That, of course, ignores the reality of the case.
Russel Bucklew spent 18 years on death row after murdering his neighbor, shooting at his girlfriend’s child, and beating his girlfriend with a gun and raping her, then escaping jail to clobber his girlfriend’s mother with a hammer. Bucklew and fellow inmates have issued a number of legal challenges to multiple different sorts of execution methods. Twelve days prior to his scheduled execution, Bucklew filed a suit to obtain another execution format due to his condition of cavernous hemangioma, which may make lethal injection painful.
Gorsuch meticulously examined Bucklew’s continually shifting strategy for avoiding execution. And just as the 8th Circuit ruled, Gorsuch found that Bucklew had failed to prove that his proposed alternative method of execution would substantially mitigate pain. He was following a precedent, Glossip v. Gross, that had arisen as a topic during his confirmation hearing.
Gorsuch has continued to issue consistent rulings, earning him the ire of almost everyone at some point. He notably ruled against the Trump administration in Sessions v. Dimaya, holding then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ invocation of the “crime of violence” rationale for deportations under the Immigration and Nationality Act as constitutionally vague. He has continued to ally with Sotomayor, notably in cases of civil asset forfeiture and prosecutorial discretion, and now he’s set to release his first book since taking the bench.
The future of the Republican Party has seemed dire at certain points over the past decade, with grifters, big government nationalists, deficit doves, and morons ebbing and flowing within the GOP. But Gorsuch has provided a beacon of what the future of conservatism should be: libertarian with respect for natural rights and devoted to a consistent originalist interpretation of the Constitution. Tax cuts come and go, but enforcement of the rule of our founding document may last several lifetimes.
