Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Gorsuch follows Scalia’s path

WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump selected Colorado federal appeals court Judge Neil Gorsuch as his Supreme Court nominee on Tuesday, opting for a highly credentialed favorite of the conservative legal establishment to fill the opening created last year by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

Trump announced his pick on prime-time TV from the White House, weeks shy of the anniversary of Scalia's death.

A decade ago, Gorsuch was confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in Denver on a voice vote in the Senate. He'll have to be confirmed there again for the Supreme Court post.

Gorsuch, 49, is seen as a less bombastic version of Scalia; he also believes in an 'originalist” interpretation of the Constitution and would seem destined to be a solidly conservative vote on the ideologically split court.

But supporters describe him as being more interested in persuasion than Scalia was.

Senate Democrats have promised a vigorous battle, believing Republican colleagues stole the court opening by refusing to hold even a hearing on former President Barack Obama's nominee for the seat, Judge Merrick Garland.

Some Democrats have pledged to try to block a vote on Trump's nominee regardless of who it was. 'I won't be complicit in this theft,” Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., wrote in an email to supporters. 'There is only one person in America who is a legitimate selection: Judge Merrick Garland.”

Other Democrats aren't likely to make such a bold move. But there already were signs that things won't be particularly cozy: Trump invited senior Democratic senators to the White House for a reception to meet his pick, but they declined the invitation, according to senior aides.

Gorsuch would be the youngest Supreme Court justice for the lifetime appointment since Clarence Thomas was confirmed in 1991. But Gorsuch has been on the bench for a decade, and came equipped for the ultimate judicial elevation.

There was service in the administration of former President George W. Bush. There is an Ivy League resume - Columbia undergrad, Harvard Law, along with a Marshall scholarship to Oxford. There is a partnership at one of Washington's top litigation law firms and a string of successful cases.

Then there is a Supreme Court clerkship. He was hired by Justice Byron White, a fellow Colorado native, who shared him with Justice Anthony Kennedy.

If Gorsuch is confirmed, Kennedy would become the first justice to sit with a former clerk on the mahogany bench.

But those who know Gorsuch and have studied his decade of solidly conservative opinions on the Court of Appeals say he more resembles the man he would replace - Scalia - than the more moderate Kennedy.

Like Scalia, Gorsuch is a proponent of originalism - meaning that judges should attempt to interpret the words of the Constitution as they were understood at the time they were written - and a textualist who considers only the words of the law being reviewed, not legislators' intent or the consequences.

Gorsuch said in a speech last spring that as a judge he had tried to follow Scalia's path.

'The great project of Justice Scalia's career was to remind us of the differences between judges and legislators,” he told an audience.

Legislators 'may appeal to their own moral convictions and to claims about social utility to reshape the law as they think it should be in the future,” Gorsuch said. But 'judges should do none of these things in a democratic society.”

On the appeals court, Gorsuch has not been called upon to consider two hot-button social issues that may come before the Supreme Court: same-sex marriage and abortion rights.

After a federal judge in Utah struck down that state's prohibition on same-sex marriage, Gorsuch was not a member of the 10th Circuit that upheld the decision.

Likewise, Gorsuch has not ruled on abortion. But activists on both sides believe they know where he stands. They point to language in his book 'The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia,” in which he opines that 'all human beings are intrinsically valuable and the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.”

Gorsuch was born in Colorado and lives near Boulder with his wife, Louise, and two daughters. His mother was Anne Gorsuch Burford, a conservative Colorado legislator picked by President Ronald Reagan as the first woman to head the Environmental Protection Agency.