January 05, 2018 10:46 AM UTC

Top Ten Stories of 2017 #3: The Rise of Neil Gorsuch

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

At the beginning of 2017, you would be forgiven for not knowing the name Neil Gorsuch. Heck, even our auto-correct would regularly change the name “Gorsuch” to “Grouch” when we first started writing about President Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee.

Gorsuch’s Supreme Court nomination would have been a huge story here even if he wasn’t a Colorado native serving on the 10^th Circuit Court of Appeals (based in Denver). After Senate Democrats threatened a filibuster over the Gorsuch nomination, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took the unprecedented step of “invoking the nuclear option” and changing Senate rules to allow confirmation of Presidential nominees such as Gorsuch with only a simple-majority vote.

Gorsuch was ultimately confirmed by a Republican-controlled Senate to replace the late Antonin Scalia, thus affirming a GOP strategy to refuse to consider former President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court and forever changing the political dialogue for future nominees.

Since being seated on the Supreme Court last summer, Gorsuch has not shied away from overtly-partisan and overly-political speechifying, and his arrogant demeanor behind his new black robe has drawn the ire of more than one Supreme Court Justice. The Gorsuch confirmation also revealed (somewhat) a shady network of right-wing donors who directed at least $23 million to something called the Judicial Crisis Network, which seems to have existed solely to promote the newest Republican nominee to the Supreme Court.

In short, Gorsuch is a symbol of the kind of blindly-partisan politics that Americans have come to despise. But he’s from Colorado, so, there’s that.