Trump appoints conservative judge Gorsuch to Supreme Court

President Donald Trump on Tuesday nominated Neil Gorsuch as a US Supreme Court judge, picking the 49-year-old federal appeals court judge to restore the court's conservative majority.

The Colorado native faces a potentially contentious confirmation battle in the US Senate after Republicans last year refused to consider president Barack Obama's nominee to fill the vacancy caused by the death of conservative justice Antonin Scalia.

Gorsuch is the youngest nominee to the nation's highest court in more than a quarter century and could influence the direction of the court for decades.

He is considered a conservative intellectual, known for backing religious rights, and is seen as very much in the mould of Scalia, a leading conservative voice on the court for decades.

Some Democrats in the US Senate, which votes on whether to confirm judicial nominees, have already said they would seek to block whoever Trump nominates.

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the choice of Gorsuch was seen by the White House as a significant departure from Supreme Court nominations from the recent past, given that many justices have come from the eastern US. Gorsuch lives in Boulder, Colorado, where he raises horses and is a life-long outdoorsman.

The official said the White House feels Gorsuch has the qualities that Democratic senators said they wanted to see in a justice during visits with senior Trump officials about filling the vacancy.

"He plays it straight. He sticks to principles and his opinions reflect a consistency regardless of who is in his courtroom," the official said of Gorsuch.

Gorsuch became the youngest US Supreme Court nominee since Republican President George HW Bush in 1991 selected conservative Clarence Thomas, who was 43 at the time.

He is the son of Anne Burford, the first woman to head the US Environmental Protection Agency. She served in Republican President Ronald Reagan's administration but resigned in 1983 amid a fight with Congress over documents on the EPA's use of a fund created to clean up toxic waste dumps nationwide.

Trump, who took office on 20 January, got the opportunity to name Scalia's replacement only because the Republican-led US Senate, in an action with little precedent in US history, refused to consider Obama's nominee for the post, appeals court judge Merrick Garland.

Obama nominated Garland on 16 March last year but Republican senators led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell denied Garland the customary confirmation hearings and vote.

Trump has said his promise to appoint a conservative justice was one of the reasons he won the 8 November presidential election, with Christian conservatives and others emphasising the importance of the pick during the campaign. Trump last week said evangelical Christians would love his nominee.

Senate clash expected

Trump's fellow Republicans hold a 52-48 majority in the Senate. The minority Democrats, irate over Garland's rebuff, potentially could try to block the nomination with procedural hurdles.

The new appointee would expand the court's conservative wing, made up of John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Kennedy long has been considered the court's pivotal vote, sometimes siding with the liberals in key cases such as the June 2016 ruling striking down abortion restrictions in Texas.

The court's restored conservative majority likely would be supportive toward the death penalty and gun rights and hostile toward campaign finance limits. Scalia's replacement also could be pivotal in cases involving abortion, religious rights, presidential powers, transgender rights, voting rights, federal regulations and others.

Gorsuch has strong academic qualifications, with an Ivy League education, attending Columbia University and, like several of the other justices on the court, Harvard Law School. He also completed a doctorate in legal philosophy at Oxford University, spent several years in private practice and worked in George W Bush's Justice Department.

Gorsuch joined an opinion in 2013 saying that owners of private companies could object on religious grounds to a provision of the Obamacare health insurance law requiring employers to provide coverage for birth control for women.

As long as Kennedy and four liberals remain on the bench, the court is not expected to pare back abortion rights as many US conservatives fervently hope. The Supreme Court legalised abortion in the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade ruling. In June, the justices ruled 5-3 to strike down a Texas law that restricted abortion access, with Kennedy and the liberals in the majority.

Longest vacancy

The current vacancy is the court's longest since a 391-day void from 1969 to 1970 during Republican Richard Nixon's presidency. After Abe Fortas resigned from the court in May 1969, the Senate voted down two nominees put forward by Nixon before confirming Harry Blackmun, who became a justice in June 1970.

Some Democrats have threatened to pursue a procedural hurdle called a filibuster, meaning 60 votes would be needed in the 100-seat Senate unless its long-standing rules are changed. 

Trump said last week he would favour Senate Republicans eliminating the filibuster, a change dubbed the "nuclear option," for Supreme Court nominees if Democrats block his pick.

Trump during his presidency may get to make additional appointments to the Supreme Court. Liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who Trump called upon to resign last July after she called him "a faker," is 83 while Kennedy is 80. Stephen Breyer, another liberal, is 78.

If any of those three is replaced by a Trump appointee, conservatives would be eager to bring cases challenging the Roe v Wade ruling in the hope it would be overturned, long a goal for many Christian conservatives.