Schumer Attacks on Gorsuch ‘Right Out of Expected Playbook’

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) spent his press conference Wednesday blasting President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee as a person who favors the “powerful over the powerless.” Legal experts familiar with Appeals Court Judge Neil Gorsuch blasted the Senate Democratic leader’s comments as partisan grandstanding.

With Gorsuch slated to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee next week, Schumer sought to paint Trump’s nominee as a judge who “prefers CEOs over truck drivers, executives over employers and corporations over consumers.”

“It seems Sen. Schumer is more interested in creating gridlock and grandstanding with the far Left than studying Judge Gorsuch’s 200-plus opinions, most of those majority opinions.”

“It seems Sen. Schumer is more interested in creating gridlock and grandstanding with the far Left than studying Judge Gorsuch’s 200-plus opinions, most of those majority opinions,” Carrie Severino, chief counsel and policy director for Judicial Crisis Network, said in a statement Wednesday. “Even in the few cases cherry-picked by Sen. Schumer, his accusations fall flat because they often include unanimous opinions joined by Clinton-appointed judges.”

In his press conference, Schumer, who voted for Gorsuch during a 2006 confirmation as a federal judge, insisted the nominee will “have to answer for his decisions, not his empathetic words, but the decisions he wrote that favored the powerful over the powerless.” Schumer also took particular issue with Gorsuch’s alleged ties to “secretive billionaire” Philip Anschutz and Chief Justice John Roberts, claiming that Gorsuch “has an instinctive reaction to side with big special corporate interests over average folks.”

“These ties that Judge Gorsuch has to a secretive billionaire and the right-wing causes he supports are very troubling,” Schumer said. “The fact that he is eerily reminiscent of Judge Roberts, one of the most active right-wing judges we have seen, means that Judge Gorsuch has a lot of questions to answer for, and when it comes to our experience with Judge Roberts, we will not be fooled again.”

Schumer’s press conference proved a predictable, pointless and partisan affair according to supporters of Gorsuch.

“The latest attacks on Judge Gorsuch are right out of the expected playbook,” Jamil Jaffer, a former clerk of Gorsuch’s, said in a statement. “In fact, we’ve seen this right from the day he was nominated: That night, I was on the steps of the Supreme Court and saw various protesters holding signs saying ‘Oppose [Blank]’ so they could just fill in the name of whomever was nominated. The protesters didn’t really care who the nominee was nor the facts about the nominee’s record.”

And now the Democrats appear to have taken their categorical opposition to nearly every aspect of Trump’s agenda to the next partisan level.

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“Anyone seriously reviewing the judge’s record finds that he is a fair and independent judge who looks at the text of law and the Constitution to decide cases,” Severino added. “Judge Gorsuch’s mainstream approach to the law has earned him widespread bipartisan support from conservatives and liberals, as well as from his colleagues and former Obama administration officials.”

Michael Kinneally, a former clerk of both Gorsuch’s and Scalia’s, noted that Gorsuch has issued more than 200 legal opinions and that an “overwhelming number” of those opinions represented majority opinions.

“The Supreme Court has not reversed a single decision he has authored. Judge Gorsuch’s record on the bench is a primary reason he has received broad bipartisan support and the American Bar Association’s highest rating,” Kinneally said in a statement. “If critics took the time to evaluate Judge Gorsuch’s writings fairly, they would quickly learn why both Democratic and Republican colleagues and former Obama administration officials support his confirmation to the Supreme Court.”