At his Senate confirmation hearing, the supreme court nominee says if Trump had asked him to overturn Roe v Wade, ‘I would have walked out the door’

Donald Trump’s supreme court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, declared on Tuesday he had made no promises to Trump or anyone else about how he would vote on abortion or other issues and testified that he would have no trouble as a justice holding anyone accountable, including the president who picked him.

During the long second day of his Senate confirmation hearing, Gorsuch made two notable statements in response to questions from members of the judiciary committee, and both related to Trump, who nominated him.

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Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Republican, asked Gorsuch whether Trump had asked him to overturn Roe v Wade, the case establishing a right to abortion, and what he would have done had Trump asked him to do so.

“Senator, I would have walked out the door,” Gorsuch replied. “That’s not what judges do.”

When the Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy asked Gorsuch if a president was free to ignore laws on national security grounds, Gorsuch replied: “Nobody is above the law in this country, and that includes the president of the United States.”

On a day mostly devoid of drama, Gorsuch batted away Democrats’ efforts to get him to reveal his views on abortion, guns and other controversial issues, insisting he kept “an open mind for the entire process” when he made rulings. His comments were similar in response to questions from majority Republicans as they tried to help him highlight his neutrality in the face of Democratic attempts to link him to Trump.

The abortion question was especially pointed because Trump himself has insisted he would appoint “pro-life justices” who would vote to overturn the 1973 Roe decision.

As Tuesday’s questioning wore on, senators and Gorsuch engaged in a routine well-established in recent confirmation hearings. The nominee resists all requests to say how he feels about supreme court decisions, even as he is asked about them again and again.

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The 49-year-old Denver appeals court judge kept a smile on his face most of the day, although he seemed to show flashes of anger under questioning from some Democrats.

Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois pressed Gorsuch on claims by a former student at the University of Colorado Law School who said Gorsuch implied in a legal ethics class in April that he believed many female job applicants unfairly manipulated companies by hiding plans to begin families. She remembered him saying that many accepted job offers but quickly left with maternity benefits.

“Those are not my words and I would never have said them,” Gorsuch said. He later explained he was trying to teach students about inappropriate questions from prospective employers, not endorsing such inquiries. Other students told the Associated Press the accuser was misconstruing the lesson.

Gorsuch was asked repeatedly by Democratic senators to defend his dissenting opinion in the case of a truck driver who was fired for disobeying orders on a frigid night and left his trailer filled with meat on the side of the road while he drove off in his cab. The two other judges on Gorsuch’s panel held that federal law protected drivers from dismissal when they refused to operate an unsafe vehicle. But Gorsuch said the driver was not refusing to drive.

He said the case “is one of those you take home at night”. But he said he could only interpret and apply laws that Congress writes.

Gorsuch reacted sharply when Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, a Democrat, asked him what he knew about a multimillion-dollar ad campaign run by a conservative group that backs his nomination. Ads have been running mainly in states won by Trump last year and in which Democratic senators face re-election in 2018.

“Is it any cause of concern to you that your nomination is the focus of a $10m political spending effort and we do not know who’s behind it?” Whitehouse asked.

Gorsuch replied: “Senator, there’s a lot about the confirmation process today that I regret. A lot.”

While Republicans are unanimous in support of Gorsuch, Democrats said they were not eager to “rubber-stamp a nominee selected by extreme interest groups and nominated by a president who lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes,” as Leahy put it.

Democrats remain incensed over how Republicans treated Barack Obama’s nominee Judge Merrick Garland, who was denied even a hearing last year after Antonin Scalia’s death created an opening on the high court. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, insisted that since a presidential campaign was under way it was the right of the next president to fill the opening, and his gamble paid off when Trump won the election and chose Gorsuch.

There are now just eight justices on the nine-member court.

On Tuesday, the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, said Gorsuch looked like he was “playing dodgeball” with the Senate committee, remarking on how the nominee repeatedly declined to expound on specific cases or his legal philosophy.

“He has bent over backwards to avoid revealing anything, anything at all, about his judicial philosophy or the legal issues that concern the American people,” the New York Democrat told reporters.

Schumer on Tuesday called for a delay in the confirmation vote for the supreme court nominee in light of the FBI’s public disclosure that it is investigating possible collusion between associates of the Trump campaign and Russia.

“There is a cloud now hanging over the head of the president, and while that’s happening, to have a lifetime appointment made by this president seems very unseemly and there ought to be delay,” Schumer said.

McConnell had a very different assessment of Gorsuch’s performance.



“If Judge Gorsuch can’t achieve 60 votes in the Senate, could any judge appointed by a Republican president be approved?” he asked reporters on Tuesday.



McConnell said the Senate would vote on Gorsuch “the week after next” and that he planned to have the confirmation process finished before the chamber left for its Easter recess on 10 April.