Speaking briefly after Trump’s announcement, with his wife at his side, Gorsuch expressed gratitude for the nomination and extolled those who held his seat before him, including his immediate predecessor.

“The towering judges that have served in this particular seat of the Supreme Court, including Antonin Scalia and Robert Jackson, are much in my mind at this moment,” he said. “Justice Scalia was a lion of the law. Agree or disagree with him, all of his colleagues on the bench share his wisdom and his humor, and like them, I miss him.”

With this nomination, Trump has met his campaign pledge to nominate a conservative jurist “in the mold of” Scalia, who died in February. Scalia’s death propelled the Court’s future to the forefront of the American political arena during the 2016 presidential election, especially on the right. A justice nominated either by then-President Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton would have likely given the Court’s liberal wing its first five-justice majority since the Warren Court of the 1960s.

To prevent such an ideological shift, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, vowed to keep Scalia’s seat vacant until after the presidential election. Senate Republicans accordingly refused to hold hearings for D.C. Circuit Chief Judge Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee for the vacancy.

Trump’s choice of Gorsuch in particular will likely hearten conservative activists and Republican members of Congress alike. He was among the 11 judges named on the second of two lists Trump released to assuage fears among the conservative legal community about his commitment to appoint a Supreme Court justice in their ideological mold. As my colleague David Graham noted earlier this week, nominating a reliably conservative jurist like Gorsuch could also shore up Trump’s support among conservatives after a rocky opening week to his presidency.

Gorsuch’s history on the bench is unlikely to disappoint them. On the Tenth Circuit, he carved out a reputation for relying upon an originalist interpretation of the Constitution—that it should be read from the perspective of those who first wrote it—when deciding cases. In the Hobby Lobby and Little Sisters of the Poor cases, which challenged the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate on religious-liberty grounds and were eventually heard by the Supreme Court, Gorsuch sided strongly with the plaintiffs.

“The opinion of the panel majority is clearly and gravely wrong—on an issue that has little to do with contraception and a great deal to do with religious liberty,” he wrote in a dissent in the Little Sisters of the Poor case. “ When a law demands that a person do something the person considers sinful, and the penalty for refusal is a large financial penalty, then the law imposes a substantial burden on that person’s free exercise of religion.”