NEW YORK — Federal appeals court Judge Neil Gorsuch served as a prolific writer and editor as an undergraduate student at Columbia University in the 1980s, well before becoming a Supreme Court justice appeared on his radar.
Gorsuch’s editing and writing style have the hallmarks of an Ivy League student, but also reveal glimpses of his lofty aspirations and ambitions that led President Trump to pick him for the high court Tuesday night.
Here are five things we learned about Trump’s Supreme Court nominee by diving into the archives at Columbia University.
1. Gorsuch: “My goal … is to remold conservatism”
Thirty years before Trump rode a populist wave to the White House, Gorsuch expressed an interest in aligning conservatism with America’s populist impulses.
Gorsuch wrote an essay extolling the virtues of conservatism for the Morningside Review, a campus journal at Columbia.
“[Conservatism] has much to say, but needs to be first distinguished from falsely labeled liberal notions,” Gorsuch wrote in “A Tory Defense” in 1986. “The ideas of Reagan, Huntington, Freedman and others are not those of Plato, Burke, Cardinal Newman, Bismark or Will; instead, they are a loose collection of dogmas on minimal government, free market and states’ rights.
“My goal, like Will’s, is to remold conservatism, to “recast (it) in a form compatible with the broad popular imperatives of the day.”
2. Gorsuch believed the Establishment served an important societal purpose
While conservatives rhetorically blast the “Establishment” as a unifying battle cry in 2017, Gorsuch rushed to its defense years before he became a veritable member of the right-leaning elite.
As a student at Columbia, Gorsuch publicly valued the “governing class” despite the social consequences he knew might head his way.
“To suggest a ‘governing class’ in this country or especially on this campus is not far from committing a suicidal stroke,” Gorsuch wrote in 1986. “But a responsible system depends on it.”
Gorsuch argued that Presidents Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter may have appeared “neighborly” and “nice,” but they were not individually equipped to answer the fundamental question of how Americans ought to live as a community. A governing class was therefore necessary.
3. Gorsuch’s paper used cartoons to mock events involving the Supreme Court
Political cartoons lampooning current events involving the Supreme Court appeared regularly in the Fed, an alternative campus newspaper at Columbia, when Gorsuch was an editor.
Gorsuch’s paper used in its first issue a political cartoon depicting Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist’s nomination hearing to become chief justice in 1986. The cartoon depicts the scene of Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts grilling Rehnquist with thought bubbles proposing how Rehnquist should have responded.
In a February 1988 issue, Gorsuch’s paper ran a cartoon showing a character depicting the contras — foreign rebel groups funded by the U.S. — feeling hung out to dry by Reagan like “Robert Bork.” Bork’s nomination for the Supreme Court was rejected in October 1987.
4. Gorsuch blasted Reagan’s State Dept. Afghanistan policy, but excused him from wrongdoing
While Gorsuch’s newspaper may have felt comfortable prodding the president, Gorsuch demonstrated a willingness to exempt Reagan from his ire.
The future judge blasted the Reagan administration for what Gorsuch perceived as the State Department’s lack of proper involvement in Afghanistan, in a winter 1986 essay for the Morningside Review.
“To condemn Reagan for merely wanting cultural exchanges seems somehow wrong,” Gorsuch wrote in “The State Department vs. Afghanistan.” “One might be able to believe that Ronald Reagan speaks honestly against totalitarianism, but the course his State Department has taken betrays a serious flaw in administration policy. The department seems most able to compile data and document atrocities, but most unwilling to take action against them.”
As a judge, Gorsuch built a reputation as someone willing to challenge federal bureaucracies and wrote critically of agencies’ attempted concentrations of federal power. Gorsuch has urged reconsideration of the Chevron doctrine, in which the Supreme Court decided that the courts should defer to executive agency interpretations of certain statutes unless they’re deemed unreasonable.
5. Gorsuch argued against making all Columbia fraternities co-ed
The college-age Gorsuch argued vehemently against making all Columbia University fraternities co-educational. Gorsuch, a Phi Gamma Delta, co-authored a piece for the Fed in March 1988 arguing that such a policy was misguided for a school that he wrote had five years earlier begun admitting women.
“Drawing analogies to slavery and segregation, supporters of the coed rule say that Columbia has a moral obligation to recognize that changing our Greek system is a matter of equal rights,” Gorsuch wrote with Michael Behringer. “What such heavy-handed moralism misses is the fact that Columbia is a pluralistic university, that its fraternity system is equally pluralistic, with options available for everyone. There is no one at Columbia who cannot join a fraternity or initiate a new one if they wish to do so.”
Gorsuch’s writings as a student at Columbia University reveal an undergraduate attracted to leadership positions, eager to mix things up and steadfast in his convictions. As conservatives cheer Gorsuch’s nomination to the high court, they may find his early politicization comforting as they look to determine what kind of justice Gorsuch could become.
