Who is President Donald Trump’s nominee for the vacant spot on the United States Supreme Court?
According to insiders, Trump had narrowed the list down to four frontrunners in recent days – Judges William Pryor, Thomas Hardiman, Neil Gorsuch, and Diane Sykes.
Of them, Trump is expected to announce Gorsuch as his choice soon.
That’s according to legal expert and veteran reporter Jan Crawford, the chief legal correspondent for CBS News. Crawford is also a former lawyer with ears on the inside of Washington, D.C.
The report has conservatives cheering. Gorsuch, appointed to the 10th circuit court by former President George W. Bush, is considered similar in many ways to former Justice Antonin Scalia.
Legal experts say Gorsuch is through-and-through a conservative who has “become a favored candidate in part because of his opinions on religious liberty including one he joined siding with closely held corporations who believed that the so-called contraceptive mandate of Obamacare violated their religious beliefs,” CNN reported Tuesday.
“And on more than one occasion, he’s aligned himself with Scalia. In the weeks after Scalia’s death last year, Gorsuch gave a talk emphasizing that ‘the great project of Justice Scalia’s career was to remind us of the differences between judges and legislators.’”
In a September statement on his list of 21 potential Supreme Court nominees, Trump wrote that “Neil Gorsuch is a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. He was appointed to the position in 2006. Judge Gorsuch previously served in the Justice Department as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General. Judge Gorsuch was a Marshall Scholar and received his law degree from Harvard. He clerked for Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy.”
Additionally, the nomination of Gorsuch would be seen as a “reach across the aisle” moment for Trump, because – while conservative — the Colorado-based judge isn’t considered as hardline as some of Trump’s other potential nominees.
— The Horn editorial team