\n\n“Neil Gorsuch was ready to blow up the US housing market over a minorlegal violation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The case in front of the Supreme Court was Collins v. Yellen <\/em>(2021), which had at its center the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), an obscure body that oversaw hundreds of billions of dollars\u2019 worth of transactions<\/a> intended to stabilize the housing market after the 2008 recession. The FHFA isled by a single director whom only the president can fire \u201cfor cause<\/a>.\u201dThe plaintiffs inCollins v. Yellen<\/em> argued the president must have unlimited power to fire the agency\u2019s head, citing the Supreme Court\u2019s 2020 ruling in Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau<\/em><\/a> (CFPB).<\/p>\n\n\n\n But under the Collins<\/em> plaintiffs\u2019 arguments, it also followed that if the FHFA head was fired, every action the agency had taken since its creation in 2008 should be declared void \u2014 a truly radical prospect. That argument won very little favor from the justices. In June, the Court handed down a relatively modest opinion<\/a> that gave President Joe Biden (and all future presidents) the power to fire the FHFA director without reversing the agency\u2019s pastwork.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Gorsuch would have none of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a partial dissent, Gorsuch complained that his colleagues were too spooked by the prospect of \u201cunwinding or disgorging hundreds of millions of dollars that have already changed hands\u201d (an underestimate of the amount of money at stake by several orders of magnitude). The proper approach, Gorsuch opined in Collins<\/em>, was to declare the FHFA\u2019s actions \u201cvoid.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n If Gorsuch had gotten his way,13 years of work and hundreds of billions of dollars\u2019 worth of transactions would have been unraveled, possibly delivering a shock to the mortgage-lending industry similar to that of the 2008 crisis \u2014 or even sending the world economy into a tailspin<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet, for Gorsuch, the potential consequences were irrelevant to how the Court should rule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It wasn\u2019t the only case this term where Gorsuch brushed aside worries about widespread disruption that could have done tremendous harm to millions of people.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The lodestar of Gorsuch\u2019s rhetoric about how judges should interpret the law is \u201ctextualism,\u201d which he described in a 2020 book<\/a> as the idea that judges\u2019 sole task when interpreting legal texts is to determine \u201cwhat an ordinary English speaker familiar with the law\u2019s usages would have understood the statutory text to mean at the time of its enactment.\u201d”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “In reality, this method rarely lives up to such lofty promises<\/a>. Many legal texts (including much of the Constitution) are ambiguous and can be fairly read in many ways. And what should a court do if it concludes that a century-old decision \u2014 one that millions of individuals and businesses may have relied on for decades \u2014 misread the text of a statute? Should 100 years of settled law be upended?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Setting aside textualism\u2019s flaws, Gorsuch\u2019s record on the Supreme Court exposes just how spotty his application of the methodology is. Though his own opinions frequently preach the gospel of textualism<\/a>, he\u2019s shown no compunction about joining other justices\u2019 opinions that treat the text of a statute as merely optional.” …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Gorsuch is also perfectly willing to follow anti-textualist precedents that yield conservative results.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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