2017 Feb 1^st

With considerable fanfare, President Trump has announced his choice for the Supreme Court; it is Neil Gorsuch of the 10^th Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Gorsuch is by all accounts very well qualified; he was a classmate of President Obama’s at Harvard Law School. He is conservative but not hopelessly immune to logic.

His opinions of interest so far have to do with assisted suicide to which he appears opposed in all circumstances. Six states now permit assisted suicide and the list may grow, so Gorsuch could be on the wrong side of history, a not unusual position for conservatives.

He also sided with a privately held company, Hobby Lobby when the company objected to providing certain forms of birth control devices and drugs available under the Affordable Care Act. The issue here, glossed over by the fury on both sides, is that Hobby Lobby has religious objections to drugs that interfere with a fertilized egg’s implantation in the uterus. They have no objection to forms of birth control and indeed provide it, if the method physically blocks the sperm’s passage to the egg.

The logic here is apparently that the fertilized egg is a human being and to interfere with its normal development is murder; but to block the fertilization is permissible. A similar logic would hold squirrels responsible for decimating oak forests because they eat acorns…but then I’m not a constitutional lawyer.

This distinguished attorney’s mother was severely ahead of her time.  Anne Gorsuch Bufford headed the Environmental Protection Agency under President Reagan. She believed that the EPA was over-regulating business and that the agency was too large and not cost-effective. During her 22 months as agency head, she cut the budget of the EPA by 22%, reduced the number of cases filed against polluters, relaxed Clean Air Act regulations, and facilitated the spraying of restricted-use pesticides. She cut the total number of agency employees, and hired staff from the industries they were supposed to be regulating. Environmentalists contended that her policies were designed to placate polluters, and accused her of trying to dismantle the agency.

In 1982, Congress charged that the EPA had mishandled the $1.6 billion toxic waste Superfund and demanded records from Gorsuch. Gorsuch refused and became the first agency director in U.S. history to be cited for contempt of Congress. At that point, Gorsuch resigned her post, citing pressures caused by the media and the congressional investigation.

Just imagine how splendidly Anne Bufford Gorsuch would fit into President Trump’s cabinet as the Director of EPA now in 2017, just nineteen years later. Trump’s current appointee is suing the agency he now heads and is surely reviewing Anne Bufford’s distinguished career as that agency’s head for ideas about how to proceed.

On another front we have had a series of murders at a Quebec Mosque in Canada.
Canadian police have since charged one suspect with the murders. Reuters reports that his name is Alexandre Bissonnette, and he's a 27-year-old college student who grew up in Quebec. He also happens to be white, a non-Muslim, and a fan of Donald Trump--- on Facebook, anyway. A second person who had been taken into custody, Mohamed Belkhadir, has since been declared a witness and not a suspect.

Sean Spicer claims that these murders are evidence that Trump is right to crack down on immigrants in spite of the obvious fact that the shooter here was not an immigrant and could have been influenced to do what he did by Trump’s xenophobia.