Criminal Justice Divides the ‘Conservative’ Judiciary
IT WAS A Monday in June 2019, and a sharply divided U.S. Supreme Court had just issued a 5–4 decision in a controversial case. Nothing unusual in that—except for the way the justices lined up to vote. At one end stood Neil Gorsuch, a conservative jurist appointed by President Donald Trump. At the opposite end stood Brett Kavanaugh, a fellow conservative and Trump appointee. What drove them so far apart?
At issue that day in United States v. Davis was a federal statute that, in the Court’s words, “threatens long prison sentences for anyone who uses a firearm in connection with certain other federal crimes. But which other federal crimes?” The law under review called for enhanced sentencing in cases involving so-called crimes of violence, which are felonies “that by [their] nature, involv[e] a substantial risk that physical force against the person or property of another may be used in the course of committing the offense.”
And what exactly does that mean? The experts differed, and that was the source of the problem as far as Gorsuch was concerned. “Even the government admits that this language, read in the way nearly everyone (including the government) has long understood it, provides no reliable way to determine which offenses qualify as crimes of violence,” he wrote for the majority, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. “In our constitutional order,” Gorsuch maintained, “a vague law is no law at all,” because it violates the core constitutional requirement that all federal statutes “give ordinary people fair warning about what” is demanded of them. This murky statute failed the test. “When Congress passes a vague law,” Gorsuch concluded, “the role of courts under our Constitution is not to fashion a new, clearer law to take its place, but to treat the law as a nullity and invite Congress to try again.”
Kavanaugh did not like the sound of that. “The Court usually reads statutes with a presumption of rationality and
