Mark Joseph Stern at Slate has the latest rundown on how swiftly Neil Gorsuch has established himself as the most insufferable omadhaun to sit on the Supreme Court since Roger Taney bought the plantation in 1864. The altogether remarkable thing, of course, is the open hostility that Gorsuch has engendered in less than a year, and how willing, albeit anonymously, people are to talk about how much they wish the newest justice would fall into a manure pit. Stern red-flags a report from Nina Totenberg, NPR's SCOTUS doyenne. From Slate + NPR:

Totenberg, a renowned court reporter who is friendly with several justices, noted that Gorsuch “ticks off some members of the court—and I don’t think it’s just the liberals.” Without exposing her sources—“you talk to former law clerks, you talk to friends, you talk to some of the justices”—Totenberg then dropped a bombshell:

My surmise, from what I’m hearing, is that Justice [Elena] Kagan really has taken [Gorsuch] on in conference. And that it’s a pretty tough battle and it’s going to get tougher. And she is about as tough as they come, and I am not sure he’s as tough—or dare I say it, maybe not as smart. I always thought he was very smart, but he has a tin ear somehow, and he doesn’t seem to bring anything new to the conversation.

Why is Totenberg’s reporting here so extraordinary? Because it’s astonishing that any reporter would hear details from conference, let alone score some genuinely juicy scuttlebutt. Conference is famously sacrosanct: It’s where the justices gather to cast their votes in the cases of the week, with each explaining his or her reasoning in order of seniority. Nobody else is allowed to attend. If rumors leak about a justice’s behavior in conference—and they basically never do—it is almost certainly a justice who leaked them.

Well, all right, then.

It's gotten so bad that we're starting to hear stories from the 10th Circuit, whence Gorsuch came to Washington, that people there couldn't stand him, either. Anyone who sat through Gorsuch's confirmation hearings could not help but be struck by the smug, entitled arrogance with which he condescended to sit through this constitutionally mandated bother before he could assume the seat that Mitch McConnell 'jacked for him.

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For example, when Senator Al Franken treed him on his stupid decision regarding the truck driver who lost his job rather than freeze to death in his disabled vehicle, Gorsuch looked at Franken as though the latter had handed him the wrong club in his weekly $5 Nassau. That he has brought this same pleasant vibe to his dealings with his fellow justices can't be a surprise. Of course, in this, he is definitely fcking with the wrong people.

During the oral arguments in Gill v. Whitford, the Wisconsin gerrymandering case, he fairly oozed with contempt for the plaintiff's arguments, only to get slapped down by Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Gorsuch launched into a patronizing spiel about separation of powers, arguing that the Court had no role whatsoever in determining that a state's election maps had been rigged. He prefaced his lecture by saying, “Maybe we can just for a second talk about the arcane matter of the Constitution.” It made you want to hit him in the face with a dead fish. Instead, RBG rose up in her chair.

“Where did ‘one person, one vote’ come from?” she asked him.

(Let us now pause here for your moment of existential terror. The arguments in Gill easily could lead one to believe that the conservative wing of the Court may be one vote away from "re-examining" Reynolds v. Sims, the 1964 Warren Court decision that established one-man-one-vote. This was a decision that overturned an Alabama apportionment scheme that had been developed to minimize African-American suffrage. Given that Roberts already has declared the Day Of Jubilee in Shelby County, it can make you wonder what might be next.)

And, according to my old Wisconsin Avenue running buddy, Joan Biskupic, another longtime Court watcher who's now at CNN, Gorsuch has proven to be such a colossal pain in the gavel that he may have alienated Chief Justice John Roberts, who may be a reactionary blight grown in the same ideological hothouses that produced Neil Gorsuch, but who also would rather not run Fight Club in chambers for the next 20 years. From CNN:

After his Senate confirmation last April, Gorsuch skipped the first scheduled justices-only meeting even though Roberts encouraged him to attend. He fired off a raft of dissenting opinions, some that seemed to scold his colleagues. He has dominated oral arguments, cutting off and correcting other justices, expounding on the scope of the Constitution. With an approach that evinces the opposite of Roberts' concern for appearances, Gorsuch spoke to a gathering of the conservative Fund for American Studies at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, embroiled in litigation about unconstitutional financial benefit for the President who appointed him.

Can somebody be too much of a colossal dick even for Washington? Ted Cruz defies this possibility daily in the Senate, the president* defies this possibility every hour he spends in the White House, and now we have Neil Gorsuch to challenge it on the Supreme Court for the next 50 years or so. Thanks, Mitch.

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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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