Ian Tuttle of National Review Online explains why New York Sen. Charles Schumer’s attack on U.S. Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch is misguided.
On Wednesday morning, Senator Schumer and his Democratic colleagues held a press conference on Capitol Hill, featuring — in the words of a press release announcing the event — “people harmed by Judge Gorsuch decisions,” who “raise serious concerns about [Gorsuch’s] record of siding against working Americans, for the powerful few.”
This is, as Senator Schumer surely recognizes, a stupid way to think about constitutional law.
Of course, it happens to be the way many people — not least Senate Democrats and their confreres in the media and elsewhere — think about constitutional law these days. To accompany Schumer’s presser, the New York Times published an exposé touting Gorsuch’s “web of ties to [a] secretive billionaire.” The “secretive” billionaire in question is oil-and-gas magnate Philip F. Anschutz, who is so “secretive” that he owns The Weekly Standard, financed the Walden Pictures film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, helped to found Major League Soccer, and is the namesake of the Anschutz Library and Anschutz Sports Pavilion at the University of Kansas. Gorsuch’s nefarious tie to Anschutz is that, while working for a prominent D.C.-area law firm, Gorsuch, who is from Colorado, helped represent the Anschutz Company, which is headquartered in Denver.
Nevertheless, Democrats have chosen their line: In Schumer’s words, Gorsuch has repeatedly sided “with the powerful against the powerless.”
Or maybe he has simply sided with . . . the law. Ironically, the three cases Senate Democrats highlighted on Wednesday show precisely that.