When Phyllis Schlafly visited Johns Hopkins in 2005 as part of a campus speakers series organized by undergraduates, she tried to bill herself as a “civil rights activist.” This prompted a quick call by me to the organizers, explaining how they were about to make Martin Luther King Jr. roll over so hard in his grave as to trigger tsunamis in the Chesapeake Bay. I was reminded of this howler (nauseating at the time) today when the New York Times gave one of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch’s old law school chums the chance to recall that Gorsuch “viewed his mother as an environmentalist, and his mother viewed herself as an environmentalist.” If true, then we have a solid reason to hope that he is prevented from taking a seat, albeit stolen, on the Court. The history of the disaster overseen by Anne Gorsuch at the Environmental Protection Agency from 1981 to 1983 has been thoroughly recorded for many years now. Even her staid successor, William Ruckelshaus, told a Senate committee after her resignation that EPA was “crippled.” Filial piety is nice, but it needs to stay at home.
