President Trump will announce his Supreme Court pick during a Tuesday evening address, and is expected to name either Neil Gorsuch or Thomas Hardiman as his choice to fill the vacant seat on the highest court in the land.
The selection, scheduled for Tuesday at 8 p.m. EST, is set to ignite Trump’s first major fight with Congress, as he has promised to nominate a judge in the mold of the conservative late-Justice Antonin Scalia, who died last year.
Gorsuch, 49, currently a judge on the 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, has modeled his own legal thinking around Scalia’s mindset.
In a Feb. 2016 address, shortly after Scalia’s death, Gorsuch criticized judges for seeking to use the law to further there own morals and ambitions.
Judges, he said, “should do none of these things in a democratic society.”
“Judges should instead strive, if humanly and so imperfectly, to apply the law as it is, focusing backward, not forward, and looking to text, structure, and history to decide what a reasonable reader at the time of the events in question would have understood the law to be,” he said.
Gorsuch was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2006, worked in the Justice Department before that, and clerked for Supreme Court justices Anthony Kennedy and Byron White.
Hardiman, 51, is currently a judge U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit in Philadelphia.
He is a staunch gun rights defender and comes from working class roots. Hardiman drove a cab when he was a teenager and to help pay for law school at Georgetown.
“He worked his way up from a working-class background, he has a really strong volunteer ethic, and he has done a lot of pro bono work,” Judicial Crisis Network chief counsel Carrie Severino told The Washington Post.
But perhaps more important for Hardiman is that a key backer of his — is the president’s sister, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, who worked alongside him on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit.