Questioning of Gorsuch in the confirmation hearings should have probed this paradox of terminology to determine which of these terms best fits Gorsuch's own judicial philosophy. But with few exceptions the Democrats generally conducted lackluster questioning of Gorsuch that lacked any sophisticated understanding of the Court's plutocratic jurisprudence.
Judge Gorsuch is known for taking a distinctly judicial-supremacist view of executive-branch authority in his criticism of what is known as the "Chevron" doctrine. This is a somewhat significant separation-of-powers rule that requires judicial deference to executive agencies' expert interpretations of their governing statutes. That Gorsuch would give somewhat less such deference than the governing rule advises is not of any great specific importance to the republic, depending on the context. Because the Federal Election Commission is a dysfunctional agency,the Gorsuch doctrine would have little impact on its role in the corrupt system.
But Gorsuch's view of judicial supremacy over the executive branch does provide an indication of his tendency toward judicial supremacy in other areas, which is of very great general importance. The core political problem responsible for the republic's decline is excessive, unchecked judicial supremacy over the legislative branch on matters of plutocratic corruption. Judicial supremacy, the opposite of strict construction, enabled the Supreme Court's alchemical conversion of money spent by plutocrats for the benefit of influence peddlers into constitutionally immunized speech -- by no more than the Court's own political diktat. This widely unpopular legislation from the bench is what has systemically corrupted politics in the U.S. This corruption has taken much of the pressure off the Court to serve the plutocracy in less systemic matters, since corrupt politicians now handle that part of the influence-peddling business.
From a middling democracy with a great deal of individual political corruption in high places, but nevertheless enjoying historic growth of both economic equality and political equality prior to 1976, the Court's Buckley v Valeo (1976) decision and its progeny have since then turned the country into a systemically corrupt plutocracy with the many dysfunctional symptoms that entails.
Among other symptoms, the plutocracy's growing economic inequality and attendant social hierarchy has caused a new civil-rights crisis that diverts democratic energies into various symbolic pressure-release valves known as identity-politics. This is how the plutocracy wing of the Democrats creates diversions from popular focus on its own corruption as the priority political issue. Democrats who deny that Gorsuch's plutocratic judicial-supremacist ideology is the priority issue need to be run out of the party. Their power to filibuster this nomination is the most direct and immediate means for them to "check and balance" judicial supremacy by sending a clear message that the historic levels of illegitimate political activity by the Supreme Court in violation of the separation of powers is no longer being ignored by Congress or by the people.
Monetizing Speech
The Court's bizarre judicial-supremacist alchemy of turning corrupt money into democratic speech has, ever since Buckley invented it, caused, in addition to wide political and economic disparity, numerous impending vectors of social and economic collapse. Catastrophic threats loom over all areas of public life and the commons that have been reduced to dysfunctional profit centers for the ruling plutocracy. These profit centers include financializing the economy for Wall Street, globalizing trade for Wal-Mart, despoiling the environment by industrial predators, commercializing health care for insurance and big pharma, carbonizing the climate for petrochemical profit, and war-profiteering for the MIC, to name just a few of the major sources of plutocratic investments in politicians. These investments buy the issuance of a variety of official licenses to kill and steal. The influence peddlers and their corrupt duopoly party make it all possible for a price, without regard for future consequences.
This catastrophic legalization of political corruption since Buckley, enforced and expanded through a series of largely 5 to 4 Supreme Court decisions, now hinges upon this single appointment of Justice Scalia's replacement. As a New England Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said recently, "if we can solve the problem of special-interest money in government a lot of other things start to get right very very quickly." Conversely a Neil Gorsuch appointment to reconstitute the plutocratic Roberts 5 will only perpetuate and further entrench the problem of special-interest money, thereby assuring that many "things" go more wrong even more quickly.
There are few paths away from plutocracy that do not lead through the Supreme Court and its bizarre theory of free speech. It is the Swamp's official gatekeeper and pro-corruption hydrologist assuring the continued flow of money from plutocrats to influence peddlers.
Gorsuch clerked for perhaps the most consequential movement conservative to preside over a lower federal court, Chief Judge Sentelle. Among several similar pro-corruption cases which he managed as Chief Judge of the influential DC Circuit, Sentelle most significantly wrote the SpeechNow.org (2010, en banc) decision that released unlimited SuperPAC spending. Because SpeechNow.org legalized all independent expenditures from any source, this was actually the large nail in the coffin of democracy for which Citizens United incorrectly gets blamed by many, including Bernie Sanders. The narrowest interpretation of the Citizens United ruling would only have legalized corporate independent expenditures of a negligible amount. It was Sentelle who converted Justice Kennedy's sweeping and unsupported dicta into a ruling that stripped the government of power to place any limits on independent expenditures, whether from for-profit corporate treasuries or elsewhere, as an essential element of "freedom of speech."
There is no doubt that Gorsuch, like his judicial mentor, will vote on the Supreme Court in favor of continuing and expanding the Buckley line of plutocratic decisions. He will therefore side against the four dissenting judges who have generally opposed those decisions in cases like Wisconsin Right to Life (2007) (legalizing sham issue ads), Citizens United (2010)(independent corporate expenditures), Arizona Free Enterprise Club (2011) (gutting public funding), American Tradition Partnership,Inc. v. Bullock (2012) (per curiam) (denying state sovereign rights and dismissing the importance of proven facts of corruption) and McCutcheon (2014) (immunity of political parties for their institutional conflicts of interest caused by undeniably influential multi-million-dollar aggregate contributions).
In Riddle v. Hickenlooper, 742 F.3d 922 (10th Cir. 2014), in a concurring opinion, Gorsuch flagged his support for the "money-is-speech" alchemy by endorsing the following transformative propositions: "the act of contributing to political campaigns implicates a 'basic constitutional freedom,' one lying 'at the foundation of a free society' and enjoying a significant relationship to the right to speak and associate -- both expressly protected First Amendment activities." This is the language used by plutocratic judicial supremacists to turn corrupt money into protected speech by nothing but a talisman of empty words, an in denial of proven facts of its cause of systemic corruption. Gorsuch invoked these words in a case that evaluated a doctrinal euphemism for judicial-supremacist power. The "various tiers of scrutiny" doctrine is used to justify supremacist protection, in this case, to the judge-made fundamental equal "right" to make corrupt political investments in violation of state anti-corruption laws.
Monetizing the First Amendment in this manner rationalizes the judicial legalization of systemic conflict of interest corruption by which plutocrats corrode and topple popular sovereignty. Gorsuch will break the current deadlock on the Court over the legitimacy of monetizing the First Amendment.
Confirmation Kabuki
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