Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, the senior Republican in the United States Senate, spoke on the Senate floor this evening in support of the nomination of Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee to serve on the United States Supreme Court.
Senator Hatch has served longer than any other current member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and has participated in the confirmation of twelve Supreme Court justices, including all of the current members of the Court.
In Neil Gorsuch’s America, the laws that bind us are made by the people’s elected representatives, not unelected, unaccountable judges.
In Neil Gorsuch’s America, the powers and limits of each branch of government are decided by the Constitution, no matter whether their enforcement produces a liberal or a conservative outcome.
In Neil Gorsuch’s America, the basic freedoms of the American people enumerated in the Bill of Rights are carefully protected, whether they are in fashion lately with the left, the right, both, or neither.
In Neil Gorsuch’s America, the views that matter are yours and mine, not those of a handful of lawyers in black robes in Washington.
Judge Gorsuch will do us proud as our next Supreme Court justice, and I will do everything in my power to ensure his confirmation. I applaud the President for his absolutely stellar choice.
On how Gorsuch is the best fit to replace Justice Scalia:
As the intellectual architect of this effort to restore the judiciary to its proper role under the Constitution, Justice Scalia was a singularly influential jurist. To say that he leaves big shoes to fill is an understatement. Any worthy successor to his legacy will not only be committed to continuing his life’s work, but also capable of delivering the sort of intellectual leadership that Justice Scalia provided for decades. Of all of the potential candidates for this vacancy, Neil Gorsuch stands out as the jurist best positioned to fill this role.
On Judge Gorsuch’s judicial philosophy:
I think there can be no doubt that Judge Gorsuch has the credentials to make him a capable and effective member of the Supreme Court. Nevertheless, I have long held that a nominee’s résumé alone—no matter how sterling—should not be considered sufficient evidence to merit confirmation to the Supreme Court. Rather, we should also consider a nominee’s judicial philosophy. In this analysis, Judge Gorsuch has developed a record that should command ironclad confidence in his understanding of the proper role of a judge under the Constitution.
The full speech, as prepared for delivery, is below:
Mr. President, I rise today in support of the nomination of Judge Neil M. Gorsuch to serve as the next Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Judge Gorsuch has been nominated to fill the seat left vacant by the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
Justice Scalia was a dear friend of mine, and his death was a great loss—not just for me personally, but for the whole nation.
Justice Scalia joined the Supreme Court after years of unbridled activism by the Court, during which time justices imposed their own left-wing views—completely unmoored from the law as written—on the American people.
In response, he led a much-needed revolution based on the enduring principle that the role of a judge is to say what the law is, not what a judge wishes it were.
As the intellectual architect of the effort to restore the judiciary to its proper role under the Constitution, Justice Scalia was a singularly influential jurist.
To say that he leaves big shoes to fill is an understatement.
Any worthy successor to his legacy will not only be committed to continuing his life’s work, but also capable of delivering the sort of intellectual leadership that Justice Scalia provided for decades.
Of all of the potential candidates for this vacancy, Neil Gorsuch stands out as the jurist best positioned to fill this role.
His résumé can only be described as stellar: Columbia University, a Marshall Scholarship to study at Oxford, Harvard Law School, clerkships for Judge Sentelle on the D.C. Circuit and for Justices White and Kennedy on the Supreme Court, a distinguished career in private practice and at the Department of Justice, and more than a decade of service on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
Even among his many talented colleagues on the federal bench, his opinions consistently stand out for their clarity, thoughtfulness, and air-tight reasoning.
In the words of one of his colleagues appointed by President Carter, Judge Gorsuch “writes opinions in a unique style that has more verve and vitality than any other judge I study on a regular basis.”
He continued: “Judge Gorsuch listens well and decides justly. His dissents are instructive rather than vitriolic. In sum, I think he is an excellent judicial craftsman.”
This view of Judge Gorsuch’s capabilities is broadly shared across a wide swath of legal observers.
Consider some other descriptions of his qualifications from outlets that could hardly be considered conservative:
The New York Times reported on his “credentials and erudition”;
The Los Angeles Times called him a “highly regarded . . . jurist”;
And ABC News described how “[i]n legal circles, he’s considered a gifted writer.”
Mr. President, I think there can be no doubt that Judge Gorsuch has the credentials to make him a capable and effective member of the Supreme Court.
Nevertheless, I have long held that a nominee’s résumé alone—no matter how sterling—should not be considered sufficient evidence to merit confirmation to the Supreme Court.
Rather, we should also consider a nominee’s judicial philosophy.
In this analysis, Judge Gorsuch has developed a record that should command ironclad confidence in his understanding of the proper role of a judge under the Constitution.
Judge Gorsuch’s opinions and writings show a clear fidelity to a judge’s proper role.
While his body of work is replete with examples of this fidelity, I want to point to one example in particular: a lecture he delivered last year in the wake of Justice Scalia’s death that is one of the most thoughtful and persuasive cases for the proper role of a judge that I have ever read.
In it, he affirmed his allegiance to the traditional account of the judicial role championed by Justice Scalia, which he described as such:
[T]he great project of Justice Scalia’s career was to remind us of the differences between judges and legislators. To remind us that legislators may appeal to their own moral convictions and to claims about social utility to reshape the law as they think it should be in the future. But that judges should do none of these things in a democratic society. That judges should instead strive (if humanly and so imperfectly) to apply the law as it is, focusing backward, not forward, and looking to text, structure, and history to decide what a reasonable reader at the time of the events in question would have understood the law to be—not to decide cases based on their own moral convictions or the policy consequences they believe might serve society best. As Justice Scalia put it, “[i]f you’re going to be a good and faithful judge, you have to resign yourself to the fact that you’re not always going to like the conclusions you reach. If you like them all the time, you’re probably doing something wrong.”
Mr. President, this is exactly the kind of judicial philosophy we need our judges to espouse, and Neil Gorsuch is exactly the man to embody it on the Supreme Court.
If there is one line in that lecture to which I could draw attention, it is the quotation of Justice Scalia’s formulation of the very basic notion that a good judge will oftentimes reach outcomes that he does not personally agree with as a matter of policy.
Such a notion should be uncontroversial.
Indeed, many of Justice Scalia’s greatest opinions came in cases in which I suspect he would have voted differently as a legislator than as a judge.
Yet such a concept might seem wholly foreign to a casual observer of media coverage of the Supreme Court, in which cases are invariably viewed through a political lens.
Decisions and justices are regularly described as liberal or conservative, with little attention paid to rationale and methodology, the matters properly at the core of a judge’s work.
This phenomenon reflects a regrettable dynamic observed by Justice Scalia himself.
As the late Justice observed, when judges substitute their personal policy preferences for the fixed and discernible meaning of the law, the selection of judges—in particular, the selection of Supreme Court justices—becomes what he called a mini-plebiscite on the meaning of the Constitution and laws of this country.
Put another way, if judges are empowered to rewrite the law as they please, the judicial appointment process becomes a matter of selecting life-tenured legislators practically immune from any accountability.
If we buy into such a system of judicial review, a system deeply at odds with the Constitution’s conception of the judiciary, then one can easily see why judicial selection becomes a matter of producing particular policy outcomes.
Thus, it is easy to see why many on the left that believe in such a system demand litmus tests on hot-button policy issues.
To them, a judge is not fit to serve unless they rule in a way that produces a particular policy.
Simply put, this is a terrible way to approach judicial selection. It undermines the Constitution and all of the crucial principles it enshrines, from the rule of law to the notion that our government’s legitimacy depends on the consent of the governed.
Mr. President, a good judge is not one that we can depend on to produce particular policy outcomes; a good judge is one we can depend on to produce the outcomes commanded by the law and the Constitution.
Neil Gorsuch has firmly established himself as that kind of judge.
In Neil Gorsuch’s America, the laws that bind us are made by the people’s elected representatives, not unelected, unaccountable judges.
In Neil Gorsuch’s America, the powers and limits of each branch of government are decided by the Constitution, no matter whether their enforcement produces a liberal or a conservative outcome.
In Neil Gorsuch’s America, the basic freedoms of the American people enumerated in the Bill of Rights are carefully protected, whether they are in fashion lately with the left, the right, both, or neither.
In Neil Gorsuch’s America, the views that matter are yours and mine, not those of a handful of lawyers in black robes in Washington.
For these reasons, I applaud the President for his absolutely stellar choice.
Judge Gorsuch will do us proud as our next Supreme Court justice, and I will do everything in my power to ensure his confirmation.
Thank you, Mr. President.
I yield the floor.
