Disarmingly warm Judge Neil Gorsuch loves ‘cold neutrality' of law
WASHINGTON - It’s poker night in a row house on Cranham Street, Oxford, England, and Neil Gorsuch, studying for yet another degree, is feeling down. His housemates decide that what Gorsuch needs is a girlfriend.
Accounts differ on whether it was a dare, goading or a gentle prod, but Gorsuch phones a woman he’d clicked with during a school dinner more than a year earlier - and she doesn’t remember him.
Awkward.
That 1994 phone call may be one of the few times that Gorsuch, a federal judge nominated for the Supreme Court by President Donald Trump, didn’t immediately stand out from the crowd. Louise Burletson agreed to go out with him anyway, and ultimately married the man Trump now describes as “perfect in almost every way” for the high court.
Gorsuch, whose Senate confirmation hearings begin Monday, is roundly described by colleagues and friends as a silver-haired combination of wicked smarts, down-to-earth modesty, disarming warmth and careful deliberation.
Critics largely agree. But even so, they don’t think he belongs on the court, believing him too quick to side with conservative and business interests at the expense of working Americans and the poor.
At age 49, Gorsuch already has marked his 10th anniversary as an appellate judge in Colorado, styling himself in the mold of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, the conservative powerhouse whom he would replace.
In his writings and lectures , Gorsuch offers himself as a “workaday judge,” one wearing “honest, unadorned black polyester” robes from a uniform supply store. (Those robes perhaps hiding coffee stains on the shirt underneath, Gorsuch admits.)
Self-deprecation is not just his shtick.
Gorsuch never mentioned to his best friend, Michael Trent, that he’d been added to the list of prospective justices Trump released last fall.
Superstitious about his prospects for joining the court, the Denver-based judge put off decisions about where his family would live in Washington and his two teenage girls would attend school, telling Trent, “I’m not there yet.”
Who is Neil Gorsuch?
He’s the dad whose standing birthday present from his family is an agreement to watch a Western with him.
He’s the sports nut who jogs with his law clerks, teaches them the Zen of fly fishing and waits at the top of the ski slopes to see which of them he’ll need to help up after a fall.
He’s the friend whose buddies remember his spot-on impressions of Jimmy Stewart and John McLaughlin, the conservative commentator who pioneered TV political talkfests.
He’s the writerly judge who crafts his opinions with uncommon clarity , going so far as to diagram a sentence in one ruling.
“He’s someone who knows the names of the security guards at the courthouse and gets to know who their families are,” says former law clerk Theresa Wardon.
“He’s the kind of person who talks about law for fun,” says Joshua Goodbaum, another former clerk.
“He’s a glass-half-full kind of guy,” says Luis Reyes, a former colleague at the Justice Department.
He’s also the judge who wrote that a university’s six-month sick leave policy was “more than sufficient” for a cancer patient who sought more time off when a flu epidemic hit and she worried about how an infection might affect her weakened immune system.
Says Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America: “I’m hearing he’s a really nice guy. That’s way too low a bar for a jurist on the highest court in the land.”
From his boyhood in Colorado, Gorsuch was a dutiful student, “always on the brainy side,” says younger brother J.J. Gorsuch. Theirs was a typical Western childhood, filled with family outings to go hiking, skiing and fishing.
Even Gorsuch’s childhood mischief tended toward the intellectual - he once read a book about gambling and put it to use by starting a basement casino for neighborhood kids.
Flash forward a few years: Gorsuch is in a coat and tie at Georgetown Prep, an all-boys school in suburban Washington. President Ronald Reagan had chosen his mother, Anne Gorsuch, a state legislator, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, and she brought her three children east. Her husband stayed in Colorado as their marriage dissolved.
Gorsuch’s friends at the Jesuit school included Bill Hughes, whose father was a Democratic congressman from New Jersey, and Trent, his father the deputy transportation secretary. Each felt pressure to protect his family name.
“We were all very cognizant of the responsibility we had to our parents not to screw up,” remembers Hughes.
With politics in the air, Gorsuch inhaled deeply. He led schoolmates to the Capitol to attend a rally for insurgents opposing the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. His yearbook entry includes a joking reference to founding the “Fascism Forever” club, a dig at left-leaning teachers. Most significant, he watched his mother’s stormy 22-month tenure at EPA end with her forced resignation after being cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over subpoenaed documents.
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