The bankruptcy of ideas

President Trump's nominee to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch is a real throwback. Really a throwback.

He is a self-described "originalist" when it comes to interpreting the Constitution. In other words, in Mr. Gorsuch's reality, the words and phrases in the Constitution mean just what they meant back in the late 18th century.

Let's see. Back in the 1780's slavery was legal in the United States. Women didn't have the right to vote. There were no cars, there were no computers. The United States was a rural agrarian society. There was also a belief back in the early days of the Republic that the Bill of Rights only applied to the federal government - not to the individual states. There was also no such thing as judicial review by the Supreme Court until Chief Justice John Marshall went looking for a justification for his ruling in Marbury v. Madison and created it out of whole cloth.

Does this mean that a Justice Gorsuch would hold any warrantless search to be unconsitutional? Would he find that the NSA's data dumps to be illegal since computers weren't something contemplated by the Founding Fathers? Will warrentless searches of cars go away since there wasn't such a thing back in George Washington's days?

Will we return to the 18th century notion of an arrest instead of looking for any way possible to not call an arrest an arrest in order to keep evidence admissible?

Will the ruling in Citizen's United be cast upon the ash heap of history since the notion of the corporate person did not exist in 1789? And what about this quaint notion that campaign contributions are a form of free speech?

Does Mr. Gorsuch believe that every armed conflict the United States has entered since the end of World War II was illegal since there was no declaration of war from Congress?

Mr. Gorsuch's self-proclaimed judicial philosophy is completely vapid. It is but a fig leaf to cover a naked attempt to turn back constitutional protections of the accused, minorities and women. Now, as much as I disliked Antonin Scalia, he made some rulings in 4th Amendment cases that protected the rights of the accused. Of course those rulings were a small counterpoint to his rulings that favored the rights of the powerful over the rights of the powerless.

This bankrupt philosophy isn't a philosophy at all. It is merely a justification to carry out a libertarian agenda that will seek to unleash capitalism at its worst.