Political Quotes

“I thank my colleague from Massachusetts for her impassioned, well-reasoned, persuasive remarks. All too often, Judge Gorsuch fixates on what we call the plain meaning of a word in the law and decides on his own meaning that he would give to that word. Sometimes he will resort to the Dictionary Act or Webster's dictionary to ascertain what he would consider the plain meaning of the law, but what he doesn't do time and again in very important cases that impact lots of lives is that he doesn't look to the context or the purpose of the law, to the point where sometimes his decisions are just bizarre and lack common sense. There was a reference made to the TransAm Trucking case where the truckdriver was in freezing weather. The brakes on his truck were not working properly, so he faced the choice of freezing to death or doing something about it but then risking being fired. So he did something about it. He got fired. Judge Gorsuch, in his reading--a very, very narrow reading of a word in the applicable provisions--deemed that his firing was correct. He was asked by Senator Franken at the hearing: What would you have done if you had been in that situation? There you are, you are about to freeze to death, and you have a truck that is not operable in a safe way unless you unhook the attachment to it. What would you have done? Judge Gorsuch basically said: I don't know what I would have done. I was not in his shoes.…”