Gorsuch 1st year: 'On far right of current Supreme Court bench'

Neil Gorsuch

Conservatives were optimistic when President Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to fill the open seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. It appears now that he's all they hoped for.

An analysis at Scotusblog by Stephen Wermeil notes Gorsuch has made it clear "he had no intention on hanging back to observe the ways of his more senior colleagues. … [He] jumped in with both feet and made his presence known."

Gorsuch even stepped into the issue of same-sex "marriage," which the court established in 2015 by a 5-4 vote, with the dissenting justices arguing the decision was not based on the U.S. Constitution.

Explained the Scotusblog: "While neither [Elena] Kagan nor [Sonia] Sotomayor were so moved in their first terms, Gorsuch wrote one such dissent on June 26, 2017, in Pavan v. Smith. Joined by Justices Thomas and Samuel Alito, Gorsuch objected to the majority's summarily striking down an Arkansas law that required the names of both mothers and fathers on birth certificates but not the names of both parents in same-sex marriages. The majority wrote that the issue had been largely resolved by Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision finding a constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry. Gorsuch insisted that Obergefell did not address the birth-certificate issue raised by the Arkansas law. And he took an additional swipe at the author of Obergefell, [Anthony] Kennedy, for whom Gorsuch was once a law clerk, remarking that nothing in the ruling addresses the issue at all, 'let alone clearly.'"

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Among the Scotusblog observations:

• "Among Gorsuch, Kagan and Sotomayor, none was slow entering the oral argument fray, but Gorsuch was somewhat more aggressive in his tone than the other two. In his very first argument on April 17, 2017, in Perry v. Merit Systems Protection Board, Gorsuch asked 30 percent of the questions posed to the lawyers, according to statistics compiled by SCOTUSblog. He engaged in several question-and-answer exchanges that spanned several pages in the Supreme Court’s transcript."
• "For comparison, if one counts the number of times a justice’s name appears in the oral-argument transcript, Gorsuch spoke 47 times in his first argument, Kagan 10 times and Sotomayor 36 times."
• "In looking at how the three justices extended themselves in their own writing, Gorsuch emerges as clearly the most aggressive by any measure."

The report said Gorsuch wrote only one majority opinion for the court but "wrote more separate opinions than Kagan or Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Anthony Kennedy did for that entire term, from October 2016 to June 2017."

"Gorsuch penned two concurring opinions and two dissenting opinions, four separate writings in all. Kagan had only one dissenting opinion, Kennedy two concurrences and Roberts two dissents."

Gorsuch, who served on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, has been, NPR said, "probably even more conservative" that the justice he replaced, Antonin Scalia.

"Justice Gorsuch seems both sure-footed and sure of himself and his views. Though he was confirmed in time to hear only the final two weeks of the term's oral arguments, his votes and opinions in those cases — and others that the court has disposed of since he was sworn in — paint a vivid picture of a justice on the far right of the current Supreme Court bench," the report said.

The analysis pointed out that Gorsuch has "voted 100 percent of the time with the court's most conservative member, Clarence Thomas."

Among the cases that will be decided in coming months is whether same-sex duos can force Christian bakers, photographers and others to violate their faith by promoting same-sex weddings.

Another case centers on whether police must have a warrant to track cellphones.

"Police State USA: How Orwell's Nightmare is Becoming Our Reality," marshals the terrifying evidence to show the world of Big Brother is much closer than we want to admit.