Looks like Democrats owe a major apology to President Donald Trump and his two Supreme Court appointees, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
Leftist threw a hysterical fit at each nomination, calling the judges political hacks out to advance an extreme Republican agenda.
Listen to the media hype, and you’d think these two distinguished jurists – each with a long and proven track recored – had been somehow brainwashed into marching lock-step on every issue.
But that’s NOT what has happened.
While both are already establishing strong credentials as conservative jurists who value the core principle of originalism, they’ve also shown their ability to think carefully, evaluate thoroughly, and still reach independent opinions.
In a single day last week, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh disagreed on THREE different cases!
“While it may be premature to draw broad conclusions about the nature of their differences, these splits show that Trump’s two nominees to the Court are anything but carbon copies or clones of one another,” Prof. Jonathan H. Adler of the Case Western Reserve University School of Law wrote for Reason.
In one case, Gorsuch joined a 5-4 opinion written by liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, which affirmed the Crow Tribe’s hunting rights remain in effect despite the fact that their territory is now part of a U.S. state, which wasn’t the case when they were granted those rights.
Kavanaugh dissented.
In the second, the two both ruled for pharmaceutical corporation Merck but still managed to disagree.
The Court’s four liberal justices were joined by two conservatives: Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas. But Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts wrote their own ruling which reached the same decision but for entirely different legal reasons.
And in the other case, nearly EVERY judge agreed in a decision involving bankruptcy.
Except for one.
Gorsuch dissented in the 8-1 opinion.
In other words, the two judges are EXACTLY what was promised: careful, independent thinkers.
Yet the liberal media is STUNNED.
“On the Supreme Court, they were widely expected to be jurisprudential twins,” a stunned New York Times reported. “But it turns out that there is more than a little daylight between” the two.
No kidding.
“Gorsuch and Kavanaugh aren’t the Georgetown Prep twins after all” exclaimed a headline on New York magazine’s website.
But why should anyone be shocked? This is what was promised. This is what Kavanaugh said during his hearings… if anyone on the left had bothered to actually listen to him instead of attacking him.
“A good judge must be an umpire – a neutral and impartial arbiter who favors no political party, litigant or policy,” Kavanaugh wrote in the Wall Street Journal during his hearings.
He said his only goal is to follow the law.
“I do not decide cases based on personal or policy preferences,” he said. “I am not a pro-plaintiff or pro-defendant judge. I am not a pro-prosecution or pro-defense judge. I am a pro-law judge.”
Carrie Severino of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network told Fox news that the two are defined by their “very solid” legal philosophy and not a “political approach.
“It starts with the law, and it starts with how we interpret this law and using the same type of interpretive techniques regardless of what the real world political results may be, but having a consistent legal approach,” she said. “That doesn’t always lead to results that one might characterize as liberal or conservative.”
But despite the split – and despite appearing at odds with each other in these and other cases – Gorsuch and Kavanaugh remain conservatives at their core.
“The fact is that this is a conservative court, and everything we know about both of these justices is that they are also very conservative,” Elizabeth B. Wydra, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, told the Times.
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert, and is the author of “America’s Final Warning.”