Elizabeth Warren took to the floor of the U.S. Senate on Wednesday to turn up the heat on Donald Trump a day after he announced Neil Gorsuch as his pick to fill the vacant seat on the Supreme Court.
Not pulling any punches, Sen. Warren reaffirmed her opposition to Gorsuch’s nomination and called him a “huge gift” for big corporations.
Video:
.@SenWarren: Nomination of Neil Gorsuch a “huge gift to the giant corporations and wealthy individuals who have stolen a Supreme Court seat” pic.twitter.com/9YrpOzxQKl
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) February 1, 2017
Warren said:
Let’s not mince words: The nomination of Judge Gorsuch is a huge gift to the giant corporations and wealthy individuals who have stolen a Supreme Court seat in order to make sure that the justice system works for them. What I’m saying shouldn’t be controversial. They haven’t made a secret of what they were doing. This is exactly why Judge Gorsuch has been on their list for four months. He is the payoff for their multimillion dollar investment.
Throughout his career, as Sen. Warren noted, Judge Gorsuch has shown that while he may be the dream judge for corporations and right-wing ideologues, he’s a nightmare for regular Americans.
When it comes to choosing between workers and big businesses, Gorsuch has chosen the latter every time.
According to the Center for American Progress, Trump’s Supreme Court pick has stood against workers in several instances, whether it was rejecting workers’ discrimination claims, overturning back pay for an employee whose compensation was “improperly reduced,” or throwing out a penalty against a corporation that failed to properly train a worker that died on the job.
Gorsuch also believes that corporations have the same religious rights as individuals, ruling in 2013 that for-profit organizations can deny employees contraception coverage. In 2016, he sided with Republican Gov. Gary Herbert who was attempting to defund Planned Parenthood in Utah.
The Center for American Progress also points out that the fossil fuel industry is “absolutely giddy” about the prospect of Gorsuch being put on the Supreme Court, noting his opposition to a previous case which the EPA relies on to preserve key environmental regulations.
In short, Trump’s SCOTUS pick is bad for workers, bad for women and bad for the environment. If corporate America could install their dream judge on the U.S. Supreme Court, he would look a lot like Neil Gorsuch.