A particular theme of President Trump’s first days in office has been contempt for the judicial branch as a check on his authority: He criticized<br />individual judges, preemptively blamed them for all future terrorist attacks and ridiculed the court system as “disgraceful.”<br />Given the administration’s disdain for the judiciary, any nominee to the Supreme Court, particularly<br />by this president, must be able to demonstrate independence from this president.<br />Of course, a judicial nominee should not prejudge how he or she would rule in a specific case to come before the court, but<br />that does not preclude the nominee from answering basic and specific questions about judicial philosophy or how he would have decided past cases.<br />As the conservative icon Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote, “Proof<br />that a justice’s mind at the time he joined the court was a complete tabula rasa in the area of constitutional adjudication would be evidence of lack of qualification, not lack of bias.”<br />Without any hints about his philosophy or examples of how he might have ruled on landmark cases, the only way<br />that Judge Gorsuch was able to demonstrate his independence as a jurist was by asserting it himself.<br />The bar is always high to achieve a seat on the Supreme Court,<br />but in these unusual times — when there is unprecedented stress on our system of checks and balances — the bar is even higher for Judge Neil M. Gorsuch to demonstrate independence.<br />The only way to demonstrate the independence necessary is for Judge Gorsuch to<br />answer specific questions about the judiciary and his judicial philosophy.
