Judge Neil Gorsuch is a fourth-generation Coloradan and conservative jurist who has written against euthanasia and in favor of political term limits.
Gorsuch, a justice on the Denver-based 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, would fill the seat of Justice Antonin Scalia, who died last year.
If nominated, Gorsuch would have to get approval from the U.S. Senate before sitting on the high court.
But unlike 2006, he likely would encounter strong resistance from Democrats, who remain angry over how Republicans stalled for months the nomination of Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s pick.
Euthanasia, birth control and other notable cases
For conservatives, Gorsuch meets conservative standards as an originalist and a textualist someone who interprets the Constitution and statutes as they were originally written.
His family has ties to the Republican party locally and in Washington, and at the age of 49, he could sit on the high court for decades a big plus for conservative supporters.
He graduated from Columbia, Harvard and Oxford, clerked for two Supreme Court justices and did a stint at the Department of Justice.
Gorsuch is best known nationally for taking the side of religious organizations that opposed parts of the Affordable Care Act that compelled coverage of contraceptives.
In one of those cases, Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby Stores, he wrote of the need for U.S. courts to give broad latitude to religious beliefs.
“It is not for secular courts to rewrite the religious complaint of a faithful adherent, or to decide whether a religious teaching about complicity imposes ‘too much’ moral disapproval on those only ‘indirectly’ assisting wrongful conduct,” he noted in a concurring opinion.
The Supreme Court later ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby, which now is not required to subsidize birth control that it finds objectionable.
Gorsuch also has written against euthanasia and assisted suicide, the latter of which Colorado legalized last November. “All human beings are intrinsically valuable and the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong,” he wrote in his 2006 book “The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia.”
Gorsuch’s published works show conservative leanings.
In a 2005 article in the National Review, Gorsuch argued that “American liberals have become addicted to the courtroom, relying on judges and lawyers rather than elected leaders and the ballot box, as the primary means of effecting their social agenda.”
Opponents cite the Hobby Lobby ruling and a dissenting position Gorsuch took in the 10th Circuit’s ruling against the Denver-based Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic order that runs nursing homes for impoverished seniors.
The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of the group, which sought an exemption to the health care law’s requirement that employer health plans provide access to contraception, sending the case back to district court.
