Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch has repeatedly favored extending greater power to states, counties, towns and American Indian tribes, according to an Associated Press review of his appeals court opinions and other writings and speeches.
The judge on the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has railed, often eloquently, about what he views as government overreach, sometimes by the courts themselves. He has promoted instead the concept of federalism, which favors states’ powers to run their own affairs. He has frequently dissented from his court’s majority when it sought to impose federal authority over other governing bodies.
President Donald Trump’s nomination of the 49-year-old Gorsuch has drawn cheers by conservative groups that view him as fulfillment of Trump’s campaign promise to appoint a conservative to the high court. If confirmed by the Senate, Gorsuch would take the seat occupied by Justice Antonin Scalia until his death a year ago. Democrats, civil rights groups, and advocates of gay and abortion rights have widely panned the selection.
Over the years, Gorsuch has argued for a federal hands-off approach toward an e-commerce tax in Colorado, for letting Oklahoma use state law to bar convicts from arguing their lawyer was ineffective, and for tribal jurisdiction over crimes on Indian lands in Utah.
“Federal courts aren’t free to intervene in any old dispute and rule any way they wish,” he wrote in 2014. He was dissenting from the appeals court majority when it allowed a federal challenge to the Colorado voter-approved law requiring public approval of new taxes. The court majority based its objections to the tax on the Guarantee Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which says that the federal government must guarantee “a republican form of government” in the states.
In a 2015 case, he added that the federal government should exercise “diffused and divided power, the better to prevent its abuse.”
Gorsuch has also bemoaned what he sees as overuse of the court system itself.
He has voiced frustration that it too often operates at a snail’s pace and at unjustifiable costs.
In a 2013 speech, Gorsuch described the law itself as confusing and bloated: “And what happens to individual freedom and equality — and to our very conception of law itself — when the criminal code comes to cover so many facets of daily life that prosecutors can almost choose their targets with impunity?”
His writings have long reflected a deep respect for powers of the states.
As an undergraduate at Columbia University, he founded a newspaper called The Federalist Paper. And in 1991, long before he became a judge, he co-wrote a law review article defending state-imposed term limits on elected officials.