The formation of Neil Gorsuch

The upbringing of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals judge likely will provide ammunition for his left-leaning opponents, as Gorsuch does not appear to have shied away from defending his conservative worldview in fights with his critics.

His willingness to lock horns with his critics is a trait that runs in the family. When he was a teenager in 1981, Gorsuch’s family moved from Colorado to the Washington, D.C., area when President Ronald Reagan selected Gorsuch’s mother, Anne Gorsuch Burford, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. She cut the EPA budget and rolled back regulations in a manner that drew the ire of Democrats while winning praise from conservative firebrand Rush Limbaugh, who lauded her as “fierce,” “defiant,” and “fearless” when reminiscing about her tenure this week.

As his mother faced criticism from liberals in the nation’s capital, Gorsuch was said to have been teased in school as “a conservative fascist.” Gorsuch attended Georgetown Preparatory School, a private Jesuit school in North Bethesda, Md., where tuition now costs more than $35,000, and he responded to the taunts by jokingly posting in his school yearbook that he founded the “Fascism Forever Club.”

Gorsuch’s subversive streak showed more boldly in his subsequent years as an undergraduate at Columbia University, according to archives reviewed by the Washington Examiner. Gorsuch was a prolific writer and editor who slammed campus liberals in several student publications.

As an associate editor of the Morningside Review, he ripped the leftists running student government.

“You see, in this last year student government leaders, with a few notable exceptions, pursued their romantic visions at our expense,” Gorsuch wrote in a spring 1986 issue of the Morningside Review journal. “They refused to spend a few hundred dollars on a party for the students as there are “starving people in Africa”; they put issues like improved athletic facilities on the back burner as “student awareness issues” took precedence in their minds. … One has to wonder if they ever ventured from their cubicles in Jay or River to the northwest side of campus to the Earl Hall Center. There, literally dozens of service organizations exist.”

Gorsuch continued to rip the student government as stocked with “irresponsible leaders” whose work “has done little but pad a few very sorry resumes.”

The Fed, an alternative newspaper that Gorsuch co-founded and edited, was even more willing to instigate disputes on campus. As editor of the Fed, Gorsuch once threatened to sue the paper’s opponents for libel. The paper regularly courted controversy and it appears its staffers had fun doing so.

“It is easy enough to jump on the bandwagon, to “get involved,” to “fight for a cause” at Columbia without ever truly exploring the underlying bases for one’s “cause,” the Fed’s editors wrote upon the founding of the magazine. “We will be different. Our voice will be an aggressive but considered one … it will be heard, and it will not be shouted down.”

Gorsuch also criticized Columbia’s main student newspaper, the Spectator — from inside the pages of the Spectator. In an opinion piece criticizing an editorial position of the Spectator, Gorsuch chided the paper’s poor grammar and defended the First Amendment in his argument that military recruiters ought to be able to recruit on campus.

“Wasn’t the First Amendment written for the explicit purpose of protecting dissenting voices, allowing them the freedom to ‘recruit’ others to their opinions?” Gorsuch wrote in the Spectator in February 1987. “Totalitarian regimes certainly don’t see much difference between recruitment and free speech: witness Daniel Ortega’s silencing of La Prensa in Nicaragua, the prohibition of opposing political parties and private association in the Soviet Union, the very existence of Gorky. Free speech is dangerous to dictators because it promises to recruit opposition; effective free speech is the best recruiting policy. Ortega knows it. Seems odd that Spec doesn’t.”

While Gorsuch’s collegiate writings are biting, they appear to demonstrate a respect for his political adversaries and perhaps a desire to persuade opponents to his line of thinking. Gorsuch’s tenure at Harvard Law was described as “more congenial than confrontational” by the Boston Globe, as he stood out as one of the school’s few conservatives. Gorsuch earned his law degree in the class of 1991 as part of a group that included President Obama, but the two men do not appear to have had any high profile run-ins.

Gorsuch reportedly frequented the Lincoln Inn’s Society as a Harvard student, a place where he liked to shoot pool. Other prominent alumni include Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and former Justice David Souter.

Gorsuch followed his college years with a stint clerking for a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals judge and then as a clerk for Justice Anthony Kennedy. If Gorsuch is confirmed, it would reportedly be the first time a justice has served alongside a former clerk on the high court. After his clerkships, Gorsuch went into private practice before working in President George W. Bush’s Justice Department. He was then appointed to the 10th Circuit judgeship by Bush.

Gorsuch’s left-leaning critics likely will use his college writings as evidence for questions about his ability to remain impartial and independent as a Supreme Court justice. But if his upbringing provides any guide, he will be ready and willing to fire back against Democratic attacks.