The Supreme Court Shortlist.


CREDIT: AP Photo/David Goldman.

CREDIT: AP Photo/David Goldman.

Think Progress has the breakdown on the three people short-listed for nomination to the supreme court, as well as the other five on the list. It’s not exactly a list of enlightened people. Given that Trump can’t manage to resurrect Scalia, he’s trying to get as close as he can. Just a bit here, click on over to read the whole nauseating list.

Neil Gorsuch. He authored a book arguing against legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia, and he sided with religious employers seeking to limit their employees’ rights to birth control coverage in the lower court decision in Hobby Lobby. Gorsuch also emerged as one of the judiciary’s leading spokespeople for an effort to hobble the Obama administration’s ability to promulgate progressive labor and environmental regulations. In the waning years of Obama’s presidency, Federalist Society events grew increasingly fixated on limiting federal agencies’ authority to take regulatory action of any kind. Often, they focused their ire on the Supreme Court’s venerable Chevron doctrine, which holds that courts should generally defer to agencies when the law authorizing a regulation is ambiguous, and typically should only strike down such regulation if the law clearly does not permit the agency’s action to move forward.

William Pryor. Pryor attacked Roe v. Wade and the Supreme Court’s landmark criminal justice decision in Miranda v. Arizona as “the worst examples of judicial activism,” and he also described Roe as “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history.” As Alabama’s attorney general, he filed a brief in the Supreme Court arguing that “States should remain free to protect the moral standards of their communities through legislation that prohibits homosexual sodomy” (the Supreme Court disagreed in Lawrence v. Texas). … Similarly, Pryor penned a majority opinion suggesting that lawyers who wish to challenge voter ID laws, a common method of voter suppression, must clear potentially insurmountable hurdles in order to do so. And he called for employers’ rights to ignore laws they object to on religious grounds to be expanded even beyond the bounds established by the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision.

Thomas Hardiman. Judge Thomas Hardiman of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit is one of the more ideologically enigmatic names on Trump’s list — although Hardiman has spoken at several events hosted by the conservative Federalist Society. … Hardiman also wrote a dissent in B.H. v. Easton Area School District holding that the First Amendment permits school officials to ban breast cancer awareness bracelets reading “I ♥ boobies! (KEEP A BREAST).” Though nine of his colleagues disagreed, Hardiman argued that these bracelets fell within an exception to the First Amendment’s free speech protections for student speech that is “lewd, vulgar, indecent, or plainly offensive.”

All the profiles at Think Progress.

Comments

  1. johnson catman says

    That list is goddamned fucked up, and so is the Pendejo Pussy-Grabber! Oops, was that “lewd, vulgar, indecent, or plainly offensive”?

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