President Trump says he plans to announce his pick for the U.S. Supreme Court next week.
The Trump administration has begun to float specific names for the high court's vacancy. The consensus seems to be that among the finalists on Trump's shortlist are Neil Gorsuch, a judge on the federal appeals court based in Denver; Judge William H. Pryor Jr. of Alabama, who served on the federal appeals court based in Atlanta; and Judge Thomas Hardiman of Pittsburgh, who serves on the 3rd Circuit Federal Court of Appeals.
All were appointed to their current positions by President George W. Bush and are considered hard-core conservatives, but there the similarity ends.
Gorsuch, 49, is considered a cerebral proponent of "originalism," the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted as the Founding Fathers would have more than 200 years ago, and of "textualism," the idea that statutes should be interpreted literally, without considering the legislative history and underlying purpose of the law. The Colorado native is Ivy League-educated, and while in undergraduate school at Columbia University, co-founded a newspaper aimed at rebutting what he considered the dominant liberal and "politically correct" philosophy on campus. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he also earned a doctorate in legal philosophy at Oxford University, where he studied as a Marshall Scholar.
In private practice, he represented mostly corporate clients, and in 2005 he became principal deputy associate attorney general in the Bush administration Justice Department. A year later he was nominated to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, where he has earned a reputation as a scholarly conservative with a flair for writing vividly that is similar to — though perhaps not as sharp in tone as — Justice Antonin Scalia, the conservative icon whose death last year created the current Supreme Court vacancy.