March 31     The first Senate vote on Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, is coming April 3. Media speculation has focused on whether enough Democrats will support Gorsuch, or whether the Republicans will have to resort to extreme measures to push through the nomination. Here’s what they miss: Gorsuch is a fascist who has been nominated to help cement the Trump/Pence regime’s fascist program into law. In particular, to further break down if not destroy the separation of church and state, and to encode into federal law Christian fundamentalist beliefs, especially on the status of women and their right to control and make decisions about their own bodies. Trump has declared that he is “putting pro-life justices on the court. I will say this: It will go back to the states, and the states will then make a determination.” In plain English, he wants to overturn Roe v. Wade. And he has every reason to count on Gorsuch being a willing accomplice in such a crime.

Gorsuch is an architect of a right wing legal “theory” called “religious freedom”. A more accurate title would be “legalized suppression by Christian zealots”. This theory allows people, corporations, businesses, and government entities to practice overt discrimination against people if they say that doing otherwise violates their “religious” (meaning, Christian fundamentalist) principles. In the notorious “Hobby Lobby” case Gorsuch argued that corporations should be allowed to deny insurance that provides contraception. Gorsuch is an advocate of government war crimes and torture. He developed legal defenses for George W. Bush’s genocidal “War on Terror” after the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. He supported suspending habeas corpus for some detainees, and wiretaps of international phone calls and wire taps of Americans. Time after time, Gorsuch has upheld police murdering people when there was no evidence of any threat against the officer. Gorsuch is a particularly grotesque concentration of why the Trump/Pence Fascist Regime must be driven from power.