President Trump’s original plan was to announce his nomination for the Supreme Court on Thursday – Groundhog Day – which would have been perfect. Unfortunately, the mess he made of an executive order aimed at Muslim refugees and immigrants, spawning a public backlash last weekend, required him to change the subject by moving up the Supreme Court announcement to Tuesday.

The reason Groundhog Day would have been perfect for the high court nomination is that we have seen this routine over and over in recent years, and somehow we never remember how it turns out. So Trump’s nominee, our Boulder County neighbor, Neil Gorsuch, is required by a well-worn fiction to declare that he would bring no ideology to the court, no desire to legislate from the bench, only an earnest, freedom-loving loyalty to the U.S. Constitution.

How many Supreme Court nominees have made this claim over the past 30 years? Well, all of them. Ronald Reagan’s 1987 nomination of Robert Bork is a cautionary tale for every subsequent nominee. Like Gorsuch, Bork was an “originalist,” meaning that he claimed to believe in interpreting the Constitution according to what its authors meant when they wrote it in the late 18th century. Unlike Gorsuch, he was a public evangelist for this view, meaning he had made it known he found no right to privacy in the Constitution. This was tantamount to a public declaration of opposition to Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision legalizing abortion.

Read more at The Boulder Daily Camera.