The Supreme Court has been widely criticized for its perceived partisanship, with the six Republican judges (including three appointed by President Donald Trump) overturning precedents from Roe v. Wade to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Yet according to one of Trump’s judges, this is not a problem because being on America’s most powerful bench “isn’t a popularity contest.”
“The judicial branch, it isn't a popularity contest, right?” Justice Neil Gorsuch told Reason’s Nick Gillespie in a podcast that dropped on Monday. Gillespie mentioned that Americans are losing faith in the Supreme Court during a larger interview about Gorsuch’s recent children’s book, “Heroes of 1776.”
“I mean, actually as we talk about in the book, one of the major grievances that the colonists had was that they didn't have independent judges,” Gorsuch continued. “They had politicized the judges and they wanted no part of that, right? And you wouldn't hire a judge to write the laws for the country. That's not self-rule. But you would hire a life-tenured judge who didn't care what anybody had thought about his decisions.”
Gorsuch added that he believes the Supreme Court is doing “pretty darn well” in serving as a model for the rest of the country, particularly when it comes to being civil with individuals with whom you disagree.
“You give us the 70 hardest cases in the country, okay?” Gorsuch said. “Now we only take the cases where the lower court judges have disagreed. That's our job is to resolve their disagreements. By and large, that's our daily fare.” He then claimed that even though he is a self-described “originalist” while a liberal judge, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, is more progressive, they remain friends.
“I'm never gonna persuade her, she's never gonna persuade me,” Gorsuch said. “We know that that's part of our job. We accept that lawyers and judges acknowledge there's disagreement. That's the nature of our profession. But we can be friends and I think we're doing a pretty good job.”
While Gorsuch claimed that he and Sotomayor are friends, in 2022 NPR reported a rumored rift between the two over the conservative’s refusal to adhere to COVID-19 protocols. Sotomayor, who has diabetes, is in a vulnerable population when it comes to potentially serious complications from a COVID-19 infection. In response to the omicron outbreak at the time, Chief Justice John Roberts reportedly asked all of the judges to wear masks at hearings. Gorsuch refused to do so, and because he is seated next to Sotomayor, the latter refrained from attending in-person hearings.
“On Wednesday, Sotomayor and Gorsuch issued a statement saying that she did not ask him to wear a mask,” NPR reported at the time. “NPR's report did not say that she did. Then, the chief justice issued a statement saying he ‘did not request Justice Gorsuch or any other justice to wear a mask on the bench.’ The NPR report said the chief justice's ask to the justices had come ‘in some form.’”