Picking a Supreme Court justice is the presidential equivalent of being an NFL general manager and trying to decide whom to pick with a high first round draft pick. It all looks good at the time, but history teaches that the odds of success are on the order of fifty percent, at least for draft picks. I think it is probably a little higher for Justices, but for every Scalia, there seems to be a David Souter lurking in the wings.
We thought one clear solid success of Trump's rocky initial year in office was Neil Gorsuch. Gorsuch seemed to combine a first rate legal mind with the sort of family history ( his mother was a cabinet official who was treated poorly by dems and the media) that would give him Clarence Thomas-level disregard for elite opinion. We might have high-fived a bit early.
Gorsuch was the swing vote in a terrible decision that will shield immigrants guilty of violent crimes from deportation. http://www.businessinsider.com/gorsuch-supreme-court-votes-immigration-case-2018-4
The case turned on whether or not a clause in the immigration law mandating deportation of violent immigrants was unduly vague. As part of a list of such crimes, it included a catch-all of crimes that by their nature made violence foreseeable. The immigrant in question was convicted of burglaries. Somehow Gorsuch and the four libs on the Court decided that it was just very unfair to deport an immigrant merely because he committed a few burglaries. After all, no one had been killed, at least not to their knowledge. How was this poor man to understand that he could be deported for burglary, when it was not specifically listed? How could he know it might involve violence?
The bottom line is that Gorsuch thought it was more important to protect a criminal immigrant's "right" to remain here over protecting innocent citizens who might wake up one night with him in their bedroom. And they have trouble understanding why we want guns.
We thought one clear solid success of Trump's rocky initial year in office was Neil Gorsuch. Gorsuch seemed to combine a first rate legal mind with the sort of family history ( his mother was a cabinet official who was treated poorly by dems and the media) that would give him Clarence Thomas-level disregard for elite opinion. We might have high-fived a bit early.
Gorsuch was the swing vote in a terrible decision that will shield immigrants guilty of violent crimes from deportation. http://www.businessinsider.com/gorsuch-supreme-court-votes-immigration-case-2018-4
The case turned on whether or not a clause in the immigration law mandating deportation of violent immigrants was unduly vague. As part of a list of such crimes, it included a catch-all of crimes that by their nature made violence foreseeable. The immigrant in question was convicted of burglaries. Somehow Gorsuch and the four libs on the Court decided that it was just very unfair to deport an immigrant merely because he committed a few burglaries. After all, no one had been killed, at least not to their knowledge. How was this poor man to understand that he could be deported for burglary, when it was not specifically listed? How could he know it might involve violence?
The bottom line is that Gorsuch thought it was more important to protect a criminal immigrant's "right" to remain here over protecting innocent citizens who might wake up one night with him in their bedroom. And they have trouble understanding why we want guns.
