The shoulder of rural and scenic Lookout Road was lined Monday afternoon with news vans and national reporters hoping for a glimpse of a man on the speculated short list of those President Donald Trump may nominate for the Supreme Court vacancy.
Neil Gorsuch, the man they were waiting to see but never did, is a conservative jurist in the intellectual mold of the late Antonin Scalia, and he hails from deep-blue Boulder, of all places.
Along with William Pryor, of Alabama, and Thomas Hardiman, of Pennsylvania, Gorsuch, 49, is considered as good a bet as anyone to be Trump’s choice. The president announced on Twitter that he’ll reveal his nominee Tuesday at 6 p.m. Mountain time.
Under normal circumstances, Gorsuch, a federal appeals court judge in Denver and adjunct law professor at the University of Colorado, would seem a winning pick for Trump. He is widely respected among his disproportionately liberal peers, colleagues and students in Boulder, who describe him as brilliant, thoughtful and charming.
“I found him to be a person of character and quality, intellectually curious and willing to debate all sides,” offered Jordan Henry, a CU law student and staunch liberal. “I think he’s dedicated to the truth, to justice, to the justice system.
“I may not always agree with him but I do think he gives all voices a fair hearing, and that’s all you can ask of a judge,” Henry said.
CU Law graduate Savannah Schaefer, who grew up with a Democrat mom and Republican dad, called Gorsch “a phenomenal guy and just brilliant. I think he’d be a gift, in some ways, if we got him nominated.”
“He acts and relates well to all people, and he did the same sort of thing in trial, where he was very good at making connections with jurors,” said attorney Mark Hansen, Gorsuch’s first boss, at the Washington, D.C., firm Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans and Figel. “He’s a regular person. It’s part of being a Westerner.”
Gorsuch is a Westerner in many other ways, too.
Though he holds degrees from Columbia, Harvard and Oxford, several colleagues commended him on Monday for being unpretentious and accessible — traits Colorado voters tend to prize.
Gorsuch lives in a 3,600-square-foot home in unincorporated Boulder County, just east of city limits in a gated subdivision with million-dollar homes and sweeping mountain views.
He, his wife, Louise — a British woman he met at Oxford — and their two daughters keep horses, chickens and goats on their 3-acre lot, and Gorsuch is known to spend his free time fly-fishing, hiking and rowing at Boulder Reservoir.
“He tried to get me to hike up some 14,000-foot mountain,” Hansen said. “It nearly killed me.”
In a recent speech, Gorsuch said he was skiing when he got the call telling him Scalia had died. Scalia’s death created the opening on the court that Gorsuch may fill.
If Gorsuch is chosen to succeed Scalia, and actually gets a Senate hearing, he’ll do so with the experience of having watched his late mother, Anne Gorsuch, being heard ahead of her confirmation as Ronald Reagan’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator.
Her nomination for that position was credited in large part to the influence of Joseph Coors, an heir to the Colorado beer fortune, on Reagan.
She was the first woman to hold that job, and her appointment forced a young Gorsuch to move from Colorado to Washington. He attended Georgetown Prep, a private high school for boys in the well-to-do suburb of Bethesda, Md.
His mother — who along with his father, David Gorsuch, graduated from CU Law in 1964 — was ultimately confirmed unanimously to her EPA post.
Twenty-five years later, George W. Bush appointed Gorsuch to the appeals court in 2006, and he was confirmed by a swift voice vote.
The path he’ll face if Trump nominates him now seems certain to be much bumpier than the confirmation process his mother faced, or those faced by former Supreme Court justices Anthony Kennedy and Byron White, both of whom Gorsuch clerked for.
But if the accounts of his students at ultra-liberal CU are to believed, his demeanor and reverence for the law will serve him well on that path — whether it dead-ends with a filibuster or leads to the kind of long career that can reasonably be expected of a judge not yet 50 years old and with a lifetime appointment.
“He mentored our entire class,” said Henry, his former pupil. “And he often encouraged us to learn how to win and lose graciously.”
Read more of this story at dailycamera.com
