I apologize to the EuroTrib community for my rantings in recent weeks.  And for, y'know, the horrors that will be unleashed on us all by this lunatic.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

On the topic of the title ...

Trump picks Neil Gorsuch to be ninth justice

Gorsuch, like late Justice Scalia, describes himself as a strict textualist in his interpretation of the constitution.

His biggest difference with Scalia comes in the field of administrative law, an area that is sleepy for most lay people but determines the scope of much government action.

The Trump nominee has been a critic of "Chevron deference", a doctrine that gives administrative agencies significant latitude with how they interpret federal statutes. His views, which are shared by a number of conservative legal scholars, would significantly weaken the federal government and allow the courts to override agency actions on issues ranging from immigration to healthcare to the environment.

Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, explained

Donald Trump has selected Neil Gorsuch, a 49-year-old federal appeals court judge on the 10th Circuit, as his choice to fill the late Justice Antonin Scalia's seat on the Supreme Court.

Gorsuch is a widely acclaimed jurist, a favorite of conservatives and libertarians but also very respected by liberal colleagues. He's exactly the kind of elite, educated figure who's traditionally made it onto the Court. His mother, Anne Gorsuch Burford, was Ronald Reagan's director of the Environmental Protection Agency from 1981 to 1983. A graduate of Columbia (where he was a Truman scholar), Oxford (where he got a doctorate under the acclaimed Catholic legal philosopher John Finnis as a Marshall scholar), and Harvard Law (which five other members of the Court attended), Gorsuch clerked on the DC Circuit and then for both Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy before working at a boutique litigation firm in Washington, DC, for 10 years and doing a brief stint in the George W. Bush Justice Department.

So it's perhaps not surprising that when Bush appointed to him to the 10th Circuit -- which covers much of the Mountain West, including Gorsuch's home state of Colorado -- at the age of 38, he was easily confirmed by voice vote.

And a quote from Paul Gowder, a legal scholar and friend of mine ...

Hot take: Gorsuch might be a nasty surprise for Trump when he rolls back Chevron & thus executive power. I might... actually be ok with this. I mean, by all rights it ought to be Garland. But Scalia part 2, bad as that is, could have been lots worse. Could have been John Yoo, Ted Cruz, or some other totally depraved monstrosity.

That being said, this is still going to be terrible for women's rights in particular. But that ship sailed when the repubs blocked Garland.

Judge Neil Gorsuch - Colorado native and Washington, D.C., veteran

Interesting snippet that I haven't read elsewhere.

Gorsuch has continued to investigate assisted suicide and euthanasia in a book ("The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia") and multiple articles in scholarly journals. As he wrote in the Wisconsin Law Review, Gorsuch believes that "any State's decision to legalize assisted suicide would likely bring with it both benefits and some attendant costs, and, accordingly, the legalization question presents a difficult moral and legal choice." A utilitarian approach to this choice "will not--and, more fundamentally, cannot--resolve the debate" because "any effort aimed at comparing the benefits and costs of assisted suicide rests on a conceptually flawed premise--namely that there exists a single scale or currency which we can use to measure fundamentally incommensurate goods." In his book, Gorsuch elaborates on these ideas, proposing as a guiding principle the intrinsic value of human life and arguing that "to act intentionally against life is to suggest that its value rests only on its transient instrumental usefulness for other ends." He suggests a standard that would leave room for patient autonomy while not allowing intentional killing.

Gorsuch went on to a ten-year career with Kellogg Huber, a litigation boutique for which Gorsuch largely represented corporate clients, and a year as the principal deputy associate attorney general at the Department of Justice. On May 10, 2006, President George W. Bush nominated Gorsuch to the 10th Circuit. The Senate confirmed Gorsuch by voice vote following uncontroversial Senate Judiciary Committee hearings that only Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) attended. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) did submit written questions on behalf of himself and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) that mostly dealt with assisted suicide and euthanasia; Gorsuch wrote in response that he would follow the law rather than personal convictions, and he added that in his writings he has largely defended existing precedent in these areas.

The Dems should apply a strict litmus test to all Trump's judge nominees: Only candidates at least 70 years old, giving preference to morbidly obese chain-smokers and people with a family history of heart failure (that last part should be easy, seeing as how they're picking from Republican nominees).

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

Well, McConnel and Senate Republicans suspended the rule requiring at least one member of a minority party to be present to constitute a quorum so they could approve Minuchin and Price, so we will probably require three Republican Senators to join the Democrats to stop anything. That is possible for Betsy DeVos as two have already come out in opposition - Collins and Murkowski.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

His mother's huge early '80s EPA scandal taints Judge Neil Gorsuch's name | McClatchy DC

 Gorsuch hasn't been a household name in the nation's capital for more than 30 years, not since the late Anne Gorsuch Burford stood at the center of the worst scandal in the history of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Now her son, appellate Judge Neil Gorsuch, is President Donald Trump's choice to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Burford, known as Anne Gorsuch until she remarried in 1983, was among a band of allies of arch-conservative Colorado brewery magnate Joseph Coors who were swept into senior government jobs under Republican President Ronald Reagan. An attorney and former Colorado state legislator, Gorsuch was known for an anti-regulatory bent.

Her stewardship as EPA administrator was marked by a string of revelations of cozy ties with chemical companies and attempts to purge the agency of scientists and enforcement staffers tasked with minimizing the presence of toxins in the air and water. Headlines about the scandal dominated the news for months in late 1982 and early 1983.