Gorsuch Gets Emotional Talking End of Life

Day 3 of Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation hearing produced an emotional moment Wednesday when Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) confronted the Supreme Court nominee over the issue of assisted suicide.

The ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee noted that her state recently passed the End of Life Options Act, which allows an adult diagnosed with a terminal disease to request an aid-in-dying drug from an attending physician.

“We’ve all been through it. My heart goes out to you. It does. I’ve been there with my dad.”

“I, in my life, have seen people die horrible deaths, family, of cancer, when there was no hope,” she said. “And my father begging me, ‘Stop this, Dianne, I’m dying.'”

Feinstein suggested she was worried, based on a book that Gorsuch wrote, that he was not sufficiently sympathetic to the pain and suffering of terminally ill patients.

Gorsuch took care to make clear that his book would not necessarily control how he would rule as a judge, but he said he agrees with the Supreme Court’s 1990 ruling in the Cruzan “right to die” case in which the majority held that people have the right to refuse treatment.

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Gorsuch became choked up when discussing his own personal connection to the issue.

“We’ve all been through it. My heart goes out to you. It does. I’ve been there with my dad,” he said, appearing to hold back tears. “And others. And at some point, you want to be left alone. Enough with the poking and the prodding. I want to go home and die in my own bed in the arms of my family.”

Gorsuch said he believes people have the right to take extraordinary measures to stop pain.

“Anything necessary to alleviate pain would be appropriate, and acceptable, even if it caused death,” he said. “Not intentionally, but knowingly. I drew a line between intent and knowingly. And I’ve been there. I have been there.”

Feinstein also used the opportunity to defend abortion rights. She noted her time on the California parole board prior to the Roe v. Wade abortion decision. At the time, after California prisoners had served a minimum amount of time, the parole board determined the rest of the sentence.

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“I have sentenced women to state prison for committing abortion,” she said. “I was a member when California had an indeterminate sentencing law, actually the youngest in the country. And I know what life was like. You have two daughters. I am one of three daughters. And I know what life was like.”

Feinstein said she worried that Gorsuch’s “originalism” beliefs “don’t bring somebody forward. They bring them backward.”

Under that philosophy, the senator argued, law is “interpreted in a backward sense.”

Gorsuch responded with a variation of the same answer he has given about originalism throughout his three-day hearing: “No one is looking to return us to horse-and-buggy days.”