WASHINGTON—Just after sunset, if you took a little jaunt down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House, you would have seen it all dolled up like a Hollywood premiere. The only thing that was missing was a red carpet ("Tell us, Senator Graham. Who are you wearing?") and Entertainment Tonight, although the latter is probably on Melania Trump's No Way in Hell list in perpetuity. He gave them a show and the television news divisions, network and cable, demonstrated that they learned nothing from getting played for two years by President* Trump and his extended carny act.

And what emerged from the ballyhoo was prospective Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, who is 49-years-old and who, if he's confirmed, and assuming the actuarial tables hold, will be bivouac'ing on the bench for three decades. It is a dark moment in your life when you realize that a Supreme Court nominee will be causing damage long after you're dead.

I am Mr. Happy Fun Guy today.

To its credit, the Democratic side of the Senate seems to be spoiling for a fight. Reaction to Gorsuch's nomination was swift and uncomplimentary. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer issued a statement that placed opposition to Gorsuch into the context of last weekend's madness.

"The Senate must insist upon 60 votes for any Supreme Court nominee, a bar that was met by each of President Obama's nominees. The burden is on Judge Neil Gorsuch to prove himself to be within the legal mainstream and, in this new era, willing to vigorously defend the Constitution from abuses of the Executive branch and protect the constitutionally enshrined rights of all Americans. Given his record, I have very serious doubts about Judge Gorsuch's ability to meet this standard. Judge Gorsuch has repeatedly sided with corporations over working people, demonstrated a hostility toward women's rights, and most troubling, hewed to an ideological approach to jurisprudence that makes me skeptical that he can be a strong, independent Justice on the Court."

And all hands seemed instantly on deck and at their stations. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi chimed in, even though the House won't have any input here except to heckle from the peanut gallery.

"After the relentless contempt for women that candidate Trump displayed throughout his campaign, it is no surprise that President Trump intends to place someone hostile to women's rights on the Supreme Court. In the Hobby Lobby case, Judge Neil Gorsuch revealed his eagerness to single out women's health for discrimination and enable employers to meddle in their workers' most intimate health decisions. "Judge Gorsuch's record reveals he holds radical views far outside the mainstream of American legal thought. The consequences of placing President Trump's justice on the Supreme Court could not be more serious or far-reaching. House Democrats stand with the American people in demanding the toughest scrutiny of Judge Gorsuch before the Republican Senate holds any vote to send him to the highest court in the land."

To be sure, Gorsuch has been nurtured literally from birth in the terrariums of what used to be called the New Right. This was a point that Senator Professor Warren made in her statement regarding his nomination.

"President Trump had the chance to select a consensus nominee to the Supreme Court. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, he failed that test. Instead, he carried out his public promise to select a nominee from a list drawn up by far right activist groups that were financed by big business interests. Judge Gorsuch has been on this list for four months. His public record, which I have reviewed in detail, paints a clear picture. Before even joining the bench, he advocated to make it easier for public companies to defraud investors. As a judge, he has twisted himself into a pretzel to make sure the rules favor giant companies over workers and individual Americans. He has sided with employers who deny wages, improperly fire workers, or retaliate against whistleblowers for misconduct. He has ruled against workers in all manner of discrimination cases. And he has demonstrated hostility toward women's access to basic health care. For years, powerful interests have executed a full-scale assault on the integrity of our federal judiciary, trying to turn the Supreme Court into one more rigged game that works only for the rich and the powerful. They spent millions to keep this seat open, and Judge Gorsuch is their reward."

His mother was the late Anne Gorsuch, whom President Ronald Reagan tasked with running the EPA into the ground. Gorsuch was such a good soldier at her mission that she wound up being cited for contempt of Congress. Young Neil came up through Columbia and Harvard Law, as one does. He clerked for both Byron White and Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court and for longtime rightwing federal appeals Judge David Sentelle, who overturned the Iran-Contra sentences of Oliver North and John Poindexter. He was also central to replacing Robert Fiske, the original Whitewater special prosecutor, with the egregious Kenneth Starr, whereupon the Great Penis Chase of the 1990s was off to the races. Gorsuch clerked for Sentelle from 1991 to 1992, when Sentelle was just getting warmed up.

Brendan Smialowski Getty Images

He is reputed to be to the right of the man he has been picked to replace, Antonin Scalia, which is mind-boggling. (How can you be to the right of Scalia without wearing bearskins to work?) He is death on reproductive rights, awful on the issue of police brutality, and a good friend to corporations. He is the very model of a modern Gilded Age jurist. He said this in a speech last year:

"The great project of Justice Scalia's career was to remind us of the differences between judges and legislators. To remind us that legislators may appeal to their own moral convictions and to claims about social utility to reshape the law as they think it should be in the future. But that judges should do none of these things in a democratic society."

(Gorsuch also enlivened one opinion by diagramming a sentence in it, an absurd exercise that was the bane of my parochial school existence. All of my diagrams looked like plans for the Erie Lackawanna railroad. I'd filibuster this guy just because he's able to do it.)

In other words, he's pretty much what any Republican nominee in 2017 would look like. Except, as we know, these are not ordinary times. "Was it a surprise?" the president* burbled, like the winner of a bass-fishing tournament holding up the winning entry. "It was a surprise, right?"

And, of course, hanging over everything was poor Merrick Garland, the man whom Barack Obama nominated to replace Scalia and to whom, in an unprecedented offense to a sitting president, a Republican Senate would not even grant a committee hearing. Even Tuesday night, after all the dark magic paid off, Senator Lindsey Graham was still running the rap that the problem with Garland's nomination was that President Obama insisted on being president for the full eight years of his two terms.

"It came when the primary season already had begun. Everybody thought Clinton was going to win. I thought she was going to win. I didn't think Trump would win. I didn't vote for Trump, but he's the president now and he deserves to have his choice."

This is all bollocks, just as it was last winter when President Obama chose Garland. The Republican senatorial majority hijacked a Supreme Court nomination and stood fast against the outrage that followed and now they have everything they wanted. Clearly, the president* outsourced this choice to the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, as he promised he would, since this was just one too many damn things about which he knows nothing that he might have to care about.

Clearly, the theocratic right got the payoff it expected when it swallowed its integrity whole and got behind the most obvious heathen ever to run for the presidency. And the rest of us get Neil Gorsuch, pure child of the Reagan Revolution, who likely will sit on the Supreme Court until 2040. By then, god willing, and if baby Jeebus is still my amigo, we all will have come to our senses. Or our grandchildren will have done so for us, as they wonder what we could possibly have been thinking in 2016.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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