Campaign Action
Popular vote loser Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, is a well-known "religious liberty" zealot. But that's not why he likely appealed to Trump. No, it's the fascism, a belief that lasted well into his college career and thus shouldn't be written off as just "youthful indiscretion." In his yearbook profile, Gorsuch declared himself the founder and leader of the "Fascism Forever Club."
Now being an immature high school student is one thing, when you throw around terms like "fascist" without the intellectual or emotional maturity to understand what that really means, even when you're at an elite high school like Georgetown Prep. But by the time you get to college, you should know better.
In January 1987 Gorsuch, then a sophomore at Columbia, wrote a staunch defense of the Reagan administration over the Iran-Contra scandal—when the White House was caught making secret weapons sales to Iran (which was outlawed at the time) to trade for hostages (also outlawed) and raise money for Nicaragua’s right-wing contras (you guessed it, also outlawed)—in the Columbia Spectator.
Dismissing the “illegality claim” as a “superficial issue,” Gorsuch wrote that Reagan possessed the executive authority to make the trade—a classic conservative argument. […]
But Gorsuch was best-known on campus for founding a conservative campus publication, The Federalist Paper, which frequently ran attacks on campus activists. One of them was Jordan Kushner, a student two years above Gorsuch who is now a civil rights lawyer in Minneapolis.
“He had something against every progressive cause,” Kushner told me. “He criticized divestment movements, he criticized the protest against gentrification…he was hostile toward issues involving racism, back when he wasn’t trying to lay the groundwork to try and become a federal judge.”
The "it's not illegal when the president does it" was clearly a theory the young Gorsuch embraced. By the time he was a graduating senior, he included this quote from Henry Kissinger with his yearbook picture: "The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer." Hey, when you're on the Supreme Court, you can dispense with that "unconstitutional" pretty darned fast.
With this president, that's a terrifying prospect.