Quick Thoughts on Neil Gorsuch

Today the Twitterverse is blowing up with news that Neil Gorsuch founded something called the "Fascism Forever Club" when he was in high school. (I assume Facebook is as well.) I'm working on a longer essay regarding the Supreme Court vacancy, but in the meantime I want to share a few thoughts.

1. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but a Donald Trump nominee is going to be the next Supreme Court justice. The Republicans played a game of hardball utterly without precedent in our nation's history, and they won. It sucks, but they won. I hate it as much as everyone else, but unless you can think of a quick way to get three Republican senators replaced by Democrats, the Dems simply don't have the votes to keep someone from being confirmed.

   (I'm here assuming that the Republicans will use the so-called "nuclear option" if the Democrats choose to filibuster.)

2. Neil Gorsuch is a colleague of my wife; she knows him personally. She reports to me that he well liked and highly respected around CU Law School as a thoughtful jurist and a good person.

   One political writer whom I trust, Tim Dickinson at Rolling Stone, has been reading some of Gorsuch's opinions, and he tweeted the following:

   reading a few opinions gorsuch seems to have more heart than alito.

   — Tim Dickinson (@7im) February 1, 2017

   in his writing gosuch seems temperamentally very different from scalia -- not the troll scalia was

   — Tim Dickinson (@7im) February 1, 2017

   ( i keep reading Gorsuch opinions/dissents that i find persuasive )

   — Tim Dickinson (@7im) February 1, 2017

   Yes, Gorsuch is intellectually and politically in the mold of Scalia. But he's clearly a far cry from being a monster.

3. It is possible to be pro-life and be a good person. I differentiate between someone with whom I disagree on the issue and really nasty people like the Operation Rescue folks. If you are unable to at least fathom why abortion remains controversial 44ish years after Roe v. Wade, you yourself have succumbed to fanaticism. Sorry.

4. We don't actually know what the "Fascism Forever Club" is. It's totally possible that it was something like a club devoted to playing the wargame Diplomacy, and it got its name because Gorsuch always wanted to play as Germany or Italy and threw a hissyfit when he wasn't so permitted. Who knows? Here's a little hint: most modern fascists (Gorsuch is only seven years old than I am) don't use "fascist" to describe themselves. They recognize that the term is kind of, uh, tainted.

   In all likelihood, the "Fascism Forever Club" was the kind of blithely intemperate thing that people do when they're in high school, because teenagers are idiots.

   And if there really is something nefarious about the "Fascism Forever Club," trust that it will come out in his confirmation hearings. Even the Republican party is likely to look askance, at least publicly, at someone who chooses to self-describe thus.

Update 3 Feb 2017: It wasn't until I woke up this morning that it occurred to me that perhaps the picture from Gorsuch's yearbook that drove this story was someone's semi-clever Photoshopped fake. The story first appeared on the NYPost, got picked up by liberal outlets like Daily Kos, and was genuinely blowing up Twitter, which is where I heard about it. But I looked into it no more deeply than that.

After I got over my initial shame of "Oh my God, have I become a 'I read it on the Internet so it must be true' person?" I realized that pretty much everything I wrote here still holds. A Trump nominee will be the next Supreme Court justice, and there is nothing the Dems can really do to stop it. Notwithstanding that I strongly disagree with his judicial philosophy, Gorsuch is qualified; more importantly, all Republican senators will think so. And it's totally possible Gorsuch played wargames back in high school.