Letter: Gorsuch appointment a sad setback for Supreme Court

To the editor:

Apart from the probability he is partly a product of the say-so of numerous know-nothings on matters of law, those who herald new US Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch as a Trump accomplishment are harboring a standard lower than rock-bottom.

Gorsuch’s pushers, peddlers and promoters included Steve Bannon, Scott Pruitt, Vice President Michael R. Pence, Ben Carson, and an assortment of climate-change deniers and/or Putin appeasers and/or reality rejectors. At the outset of his tenure, the new SCOTUS member lacked the opportunity to impart his over-touted intellect to a case calling for a decision on the law.

But with the puerile petulance so prevalent with his appointer, he soon blew off the opportunity to deliver the court from a horrendous contretemps: the crackpot scheme by Arkansas to execute eight death-row inmates before the statutory expiry of the state’s power to use a certain questionable method. What, pray tell, proved accomplished about his failure to provide a fifth vote to put at least a pause on a most ruthless and near-breathless execution spree by Gov. Asa Hutchinson and his executive minions?

So now our nation’s highest judicial tribunal is stuck with a guy whose lower-court record reeks of nearly a decade of rulings and decisions that, regardless of the facts and the law, almost always favored the high-rollers and/or the highly connected. We deserve better, but we dare not expect it.

Charles M. Moran Jr.

Tiverton