After spending millions to get him on the court, judicial activists are feeling betrayed.
On Monday, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch betrayed the Constitution and the great cause of equality for which so many civil rights leaders fought, according to a number of really distraught conservative judicial activists.
As Mark Joseph Stern explained, the justices followed a straightforward legal theory that the portion of the Civil Rights Act that prohibits discrimination “because of sex” encompassed discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. It’s impossible for an employer to discriminate against a gay or transgender person without taking into account the person’s sex, which would mean discriminating on that basis, Gorsuch reasoned.
This did not sit well with the conservative legal activists who put time, energy, and vast amounts of money into securing Gorsuch’s confirmation to replace Justice Antonin Scalia at the start of President Donald Trump’s term.
Gorsuch’s Monday opinion apparently enraged Carrie Severino, the president of the Judicial Crisis Network, an organization that reportedly spent $10 million to secure Gorsuch’s confirmation in 2017 and promised another $10 million to secure Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s in 2018. Severino accused Gorsuch of ruling “for the sake of appealing to college campuses and editorial boards” in “a brute force attack on our constitutional system.”
New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari—most famous for his position that liberal democracy is beginning to get in the way of conservatives’ ability to go about “defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good”—was frustrated as well.
The joint frustrations of the conservative institutionalists vs. the anti-institutionalists resulted in a bit of maudlin backbiting over what exactly went wrong today.
Meanwhile, senior editor at the Conservative Review Daniel Horowitz endorsed Hammer’s notion that the Republican Party writ large—as embodied by its choices of Supreme Court justices—had failed the conservative movement.
Hammer, for his part, was so angry about the news that he even attacked one of the dissenting justices, Brett Kavanaugh. Despite saying he would rule against the rights of LGBTQ people in this case, Kavanaugh apparently committed the sin in Hammer’s eyes of not being mean enough to them in doing it.
Kavanaugh wrote that “notwithstanding my concern about the Court’s transgression of the Constitution’s separation of powers, it is appropriate to acknowledge the important victory achieved today by gay and lesbian Americans. … [They] can take pride in today’s result.”
As Hammer responded to these empty words in a since-deleted tweet:
So even one of the three dissenters feels compelled to flaunt his virtue for the mob. There are literally two good justices on the Court: Thomas and Alito. The “conservative legal movement” is a failure.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/carrie-severino-meltdown-neil-gorsuch-lgbtq-rights.html