April 05, 2017 12:54 PM UTC

Neil "McPlagiarist" Gorsuch, Anyone?

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• by: Colorado Pols

Politico reporting on a story that could shake up the U.S. Supreme Court confirmation battle over Judge Neil Gorsuch–but may not, given that Republicans in control of the U.S. Senate have locked down in determination to confirm him come hell or high water:

Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch copied the structure and language used by several authors and failed to cite source material in his book and an academic article, according to documents provided to POLITICO.

The documents show that several passages from the tenth chapter of his 2006 book, “The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia,” read nearly verbatim to a 1984 article in the Indiana Law Journal. In several other instances in that book and an academic article published in 2000, Gorsuch borrowed from the ideas, quotes and structures of scholarly and legal works without citing them.

The findings come as Republicans are on the brink of changing Senate rules to confirm Gorsuch over the vehement objections of Democrats. The documents could raise questions about the rigor of Gorsuch’s scholarship, which Republicans have portrayed during the confirmation process as unimpeachable…

We learned a great deal about what academically constitutes plagiarism back in 2010, when it was discovered that GOP gubernatorial frontrunner Scott McInnis had extensively plagiarized articles on water policy authored by former Colorado Supreme Court Justice Gregory Hobbs. Like Justice Hobbs in 2010, the original author of the work allegedly plagiarized by Gorsuch is being quite gracious about it–even suggesting that Gorsuch’s reuse of her words is acceptable, which is a bit farther than Hobbs went for McInnis.

What we can tell you is that the examples of apparent plagiarism citied by Politico do not appear to be close cases:

Apparently, Gorsuch attempted to conceal the plagiarism by citing not the article he copied and pasted from, but the sources cited by the original author. That, combined with the unmistakably identical reused verbiage with only very minor changes, is a major red flag for deliberate plagiarism. If Gorsuch had been in school when this article was published, we find it hard to imagine that he would escape severe academic sanction.

So what does it mean for Donald Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee? That depends on how Republicans in control of the U.S. Senate respond to these revelations. Obviously Democrats already lined up to filibuster need no further convincing–so the question is whether any Republicans Senators recall from their college days that plagiarism is a really bad thing for scholars and especially Supreme Court nominees to do.

And who have the courage to speak up at the eleventh hour.