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While the disastrous Trumpcare bill has distracted most of the nation for the past week or so, there's another looming decision the Senate has to make. It’s a decision that will reverberate for decades to come, and can't be undone by a future Democratic Congress: the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
Democrats are using the backdrop of Trumpcare and of Trump's erratic behavior and bad policies to focus on Gorsuch's weakness as a nominee. The narrative will show Gorsuch as an enemy of the little guy who will not operate independently of Trump.
One week before Judge Neil M. Gorsuch is to sit for his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, Democrats have zeroed in on their most prominent planned line of attack: Judge Gorsuch’s rulings have favored the powerful and well connected. And he has done little, they will say, to demonstrate his independence from a president whose combative relationship with the judiciary has already clouded the nominating process. […]
Democrats are expected to point out several instances they say highlight his tendency to side against the little guy. In one case, Judge Gorsuch argued in a dissent that a company was permitted to fire a truck driver for abandoning his cargo for his own safety in subzero temperatures.
In another, he ruled against a family seeking reimbursement under a federal disabilities law for the cost of sending a child with severe autism to a specialized school. Then there was the professor who lost her job after taking time off to recover from cancer: Judge Gorsuch denied her federal discrimination claim, saying that while the predicament was “in no way of her own making,” it was “a problem other forms of social security aim to address.”
“You can find example after example of Judge Gorsuch siding against workers even in the most dire circumstances,” Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the No. 3 ranking Senate Democrat, said last week at an event with union and disability rights representatives.
That's the very salient argument against Gorsuch as a judge, particularly in the New Gilded Age of Trump. But the hearings will also be a referendum on Trump and Gorsuch's failure to demonstrate that he'll actually be a check on this president. Given his strong corporatist bent thus far on the bench and his wishy-washy dismissal of Trump's attacks on the judiciary, there's little indication that Gorsuch would rise to the job.