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So much for a Supreme Court justice who would be a check on an overreaching, lawless, unitary executive. Let's go back to the really bad old days of the Bush/Cheney regime and that hallmark of it: torture. Neil Gorsuch, popular vote loser Donald Trump's nominee to sit on the high court, was a top Justice Department official in those days, and one of many of its torture defenders. If this is not a disqualifying bit of his professional history, I don't know what would be.
Gorsuch also took an active role in developing talking points for the administration on detainees, including whether "enhanced interrogation" works.
"Yes," is handwritten next to a typed question: "Have the aggressive interrogation techniques employed by the Admin yielded any valuable intelligence?"
There's more.
During the negotiations with Congress over the Detainee Treatment Act, Judge Gorsuch helped persuade lawmakers to weaken a provision that permitted a civilian appeals court to review decisions by military tribunals. The original draft let judges scrutinize whether a tribunal had "applied the correct standards," but the revised one only let them look to see whether the tribunal had applied standards set by the Pentagon.
The change, "in response to our concerns," Judge Gorsuch wrote, "reduces significantly the potential for judicial creativity."
Judicial "creativity," or as some might call it, upholding the constitution.
He was also part of teams that helped draft speeches on national security for Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and an op-ed published by USA Today, under his supervisor's byline, defending President Bush's warrantless surveillance program and his use of a signing statement to claim a right to bypass the Detainee Treatment Act's provision banning torture.
And that's just from the stuff he has released. There's plenty missing from the documents he submitted. Like exactly what was in his "proposal for a seminar on torture policy" to the Council on Foreign Relations. One document in the materials submitted said he made that proposal, but the proposal itself wasn't included. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has given him until the end of Thursday to provide it, as well as "any materials related to any involvement you had in the issue of torture (including so-called 'enhanced interrogation techniques'), including this proposal."
There's every indication that Gorsuch was an enthusiastic member of Gonzales's team of lawless unitary executive boosters for the 14 months he served there, before being rewarded by Bush with an appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in July 2006. So when Trump wants to bring back waterboarding—"you bet your ass" he would approve it, he promised, along with "much worse"—will Gorsuch be a vote on the Court to rubber stamp it? It sure looks that way. If he not only would not stand up to the worse abuses of BushCo, but actually actively participated in them, he has absolutely no place on the Supreme Court.