Senate Democrats on Thursday tried to bloody Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch with a sympathetic father of an autistic boy whose family was dissatisfied with the educational services the child received.
Jeff Perkins blasted Gorsuch for his majority opinion in a ruling by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver that overturned the decision of an administrative law judge in a case involving the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
“In this 10th Circuit ruling, Judge Gorsuch eviscerated the educational standard guaranteed by the IDEA.”
Perkins testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that his wife decided to move with their son, Luke, to anther state where he could receive the specialized services that he needed. Perkins showed the panel a Lego model of the Capitol building that his son had made and added that the now-grown man is doing well.
“He is also unaware of the key place that one judge, with his radically restrictive interpretation of law, played in the fight for his right to a free and appropriate education,” Perkins testified. “In this 10th Circuit ruling, Judge Gorsuch eviscerated the educational standard guaranteed by the IDEA. His interpretation requires that a school provide an education to a disabled child that is just above meaningless.”
[lz_jwplayer video=ZsByHX6q]
Democratic senators piled on, noting Wednesday’s unanimous ruling by the Supreme Court that reached the opposite conclusion that Gorsuch did in the 2008 case involving Perkins’ son.
To hear Perkins and Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, you’d think Gorsuch was a cruel-hearted caricature who reached far outside of American jurisprudence. But appeals court judges do not rule alone. There were two other judges on the appellate panel that considered the case, and the decision was unanimous.
One of those judges, Mary Briscoe, was an appointee of former President Bill Clinton. Prior to her service as a federal judge, she won appointment by a Democratic governor to the Kansas Court of Appeals.
Gorsuch and his colleagues determined the family was seeking relief that went beyond what Congress intended when it passed the law.
“While we are sympathetic to Luke’s parents’ desire to see their child thrive, the difficulty with their argument is that Congress did not provide in IDEA a guarantee of self-sufficiency for all disabled persons, and the most authoritative arbiter of congressional intent has already reached this conclusion,” Gorsuch wrote for the court.
[lz_related_box id=”519927″]
Perkins made a sympathetic witness as he described the personal hardships his family endured. But the testimony — and his explicit call for the Senate to reject Gorsuch — represents the kind of results-oriented approach to the evaluation of judges that troubles conservatives and some liberal-leaning legal scholars.
Leah Bressack, a former law clerk for Gorsuch who had testified earlier on Thursday, spoke up in his defense. She described him as an “incredibly caring” man who takes seriously his oath to apply the law without regard to the status of the litigants or his personal beliefs.
“Sometimes that means results that are not in favor of very sympathetic parties,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that he lacks sympathy for them.”
Bressack said it is unfair to given outsized weight to a handful of rulings Gorsuch has made over the course of a 10 1/2-year career on the bench. She pointed to criticism the judge has received for his dissent in a decision involving a trucker who lost his job for failing to stay with his malfunctioning vehicle in freezing weather.
“We’re focused on certain cases in which he may have ruled against certain workers,” she said. “But there are a number of other decisions that I believe the panel, the committee, is aware of, where he ruled in favor of workers.”
Join the Discussion
Comments are currently closed.