Neil Gorsuch Is Such An A-Hole And Republican-Fascists Have Guaranteed That He Is The Future Of The Supreme Court

Jeffrey Toobin said it so well that I don't think I have much to add.

The argument had gone on for nearly an hour when Gorsuch began a question as follows: “Maybe we can just for a second talk about the arcane matter of the Constitution.” There was a rich subtext to this query. Originalists and textualists such as Gorsuch, and his predecessor on the Court, Antonin Scalia, often criticize their colleagues for inventing rights that are not found in the nation’s founding document. Gorsuch’s statement that the Court should spare “a second” for the “arcane” subject of the document was thus a slap at his ideological adversaries; of course, they, too, believe that they are interpreting the Constitution, but, in Gorsuch’s view, only he cares about the document itself.

Gorsuch went on to give his colleagues a civics lecture about the text of the Constitution. “And where exactly do we get authority to revise state legislative lines? When the Constitution authorizes the federal government to step in on state legislative matters, it’s pretty clear—if you look at the Fifteenth Amendment, you look at the Nineteenth Amendment, the Twenty-sixth Amendment, and even the Fourteenth Amendment, Section 2.” In other words, Gorsuch was saying, why should the Court involve itself in the subject of redistricting at all—didn’t the Constitution fail to give the Court the authority to do so?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is bent with age, can sometimes look disengaged or even sleepy during arguments, and she had that droopy look today as well. But, in this moment, she heard Gorsuch very clearly, and she didn’t even raise her head before offering a brisk and convincing dismissal. In her still Brooklyn-flecked drawl, she grumbled, “Where did ‘one person, one vote’ come from?” There might have been an audible woo that echoed through the courtroom. (Ginsburg’s comment seemed to silence Gorsuch for the rest of the arguments.)

In one cutting remark, Ginsburg summed up how Gorsuch’s patronizing lecture omitted some of the Court’s most important precedents, and Smith gratefully followed up on it: “That’s what Reynolds v. Sims and Baker v. Carr did, and a number of other cases that have followed along since.” In these cases, from the early nineteen-sixties, the Court established that the Justices, via the First and Fourteenth Amendments, very much had the right to tell states how to run their elections.

In short, Ginsburg was saying to Gorsuch that he and his allies might control the future of the Supreme Court, but she wasn’t going to let them rewrite the history of it—at least not without a fight.

Ok, you know me better than to think I won't have something to say.  This is a good example of how the fascists will use the language of the Constitution to destroy democracy, installing de facto one party rule and a government that greatest desideratum of the rich, the powerful and the mainstream of the American media and much of legal academia, government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.

About the only glimmer of light I see in this is that Gorsuch is such a callow. conceited and sanctimonious asshole that I think he's going to be unpopular with even some of his fellow fascists.  I recall reading that in his first session of oral arguments that even Alito lashed out at his idiotic and superficial dismissal of the complexity they were dealing with.  The boy is a pretty face put up by the Federalist Fascists because they knew they could run him and his looks would conceal the banality of evil to people trained to think by show-biz.

Update:  RMJ's comment shows how good it is for us non-lawyers to listen to people trained in the law.

I wanted to add to RBG's comment: "Or judicial review, for that matter?" Which is a product of Marbury v. Madison, and a doctrine hotly opposed by Jefferson, among others, as not being a part of the Constitution at all.'

"Originalists" are very proof-texting assholes. Nothing "originalist" in Scalia's Heller opinion. It's convenient bit of sophistry for saying "I'm right and you're wrong" no matter what the Constitutional issue is.

I will confess that my respect for the kind of logical thought that can come with a good legal training wielded for honest purposes has risen even as my disgust at how a stupid scientism has become the "civic religion" of so many has grown, a direct result of being able to read more scientists and their lay faithful on the alleged left, online.