Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has a book coming out, so he’s doing what every author does to sell books and what most justices don’t to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Justice Gorsuch sat for an interview with David French. To be fair, David is a lawyer, a never-Trump conservative and deeply religious, so there was little expectation of an interview starting with “j’accuse.”

That said, it was a very interesting interview and revealed some of Gorsuch’s views that are often overlooked by pundits lambasting him for being on the wrong side of a decision. Notably, he served as a judge on the Tenth Circuit from 2006 until 2017, when he was appointed by Trump to the Supreme Court, where he was well-regarded and uncontroversial. But nothing courts hatred like an appointment by Trump, even though a dear friend to SJ, Senior District Judge John Kane, testified on then-Judge Gorsuch’s behalf at his confirmation hearing.

The interview is rather long, but it’s worth a full read. Here’s a taste.

David French: So I want to start by talking about the book. It takes direct aim at the proliferation of rules, regulations and statutes that govern our lives. But I’m really intrigued by the emphasis on the human toll. Critics of the regulatory state often emphasize the economic toll of dense regulations and rules. They’ll tell you if we can smooth out the Federal Register, we could save X billions of dollars, for example. But its defenders will say, “Well, wait a minute. These regulations might create economic inefficiencies, but they actually protect people.” Your book says that’s not necessarily the case. What is the human toll?

Neil Gorsuch: Well, that’s sort of a question about why I wrote the book, David, I think. And the answer is, I’ve been a judge for about 18 years now. And I just have seen so many cases in which ordinary, hard-working, decent Americans, trying to do their best and intending no harm to anyone, just get caught up in a wall of rules or laws that they didn’t know existed.

And having sat through those cases, I wanted to know more about how that came to be, why, and more about them.

So really, the book’s a book of stories about them, of a fisherman in Florida, about monks in Louisiana, about hair braiders in Texas. And they’re cases I’ve seen or some of my colleagues have told me about, and it is not an attack at all on law or regulation. For goodness’ sake, I’m a lawyer and a judge. And some law is absolutely necessary, in order to protect our liberties and our safety.

Washington called that “ordered liberty.” But the founders also knew that too much law poses some dangers as well. James Madison talked about that in The Federalist, and he said a couple of things happen. One, you start losing your liberties. And two, it impacts different populations differently. So the moneyed and the connected can find their way through a maze of litigation and through a maze of regulation. But what about ordinary Americans?

And if that doesn’t pique your interest, try this on for size.

French: You speak in the book about coercive plea bargaining, this process where a prosecutor will charge somebody and then agree to a much reduced sentence on the condition that they don’t take it to trial, that they go ahead and plead guilty, or sometimes when they refuse to plead guilty, they’ll add additional charges. This is something that a lot of critics of the criminal justice system have highlighted for some time. Do you see a remedy?

Gorsuch: Well, I’m a judge, and I’m going to apply the laws we the people pass. That’s my job. In the book, I just wanted to highlight to “we the people” some of the changes that I’ve seen in our law during my lifetime, and plea bargaining during my lifetime has skyrocketed. It basically didn’t exist 50 or 100 years ago, and now 97 percent or so of federal criminal charges are resolved through plea bargaining.

And I just have some questions. What do we lose in that process? We lose juries. Juries are wise, right? And they’re a check both on the executive branch and prosecutors and they’re a check on judges, too, right? And the framers really believed in juries. I mean, there it is in Article 3. There it is in the Sixth Amendment. There it is in the Seventh Amendment. They really believed in juries, and we’ve lost that.

And another thing about juries, when you lose juries: Studies show that people who sit on juries — nobody likes being called for jury service. But studies show that after jury service, people have a greater respect for the legal system, for the government, and they participate more in their local governments.

Not quite what Linda Greenhouse led you to believe would come from the lips of her illegitimate partisan hack. But that’s the problem, as amply reflected by the most highly recommended comments at the New York Times. The top comment:

In his altogether too friendly interview with Gorsuch, Mr. French failed to ask the most pressing of questions: How does any Justice claiming to be an originalist, let alone textualist, find a Constitutional basis for granting absolute immunity to a President for any act deemed part of official Article I powers?

The runner-up:

I couldn’t make it through this interview because I don’t want to start my day angry. It takes a lot of gall for French and Gorsuch to pretend that dismantling regulations is all for the average guy and not for corporations who want to make more money without safeguards for the rest of us.

And to round out the top three:

My first question is: “How can you be a Supreme Court Justice when Mitch McConnell unethically ignored Obama’s nomination of Justice Garland and you were appointed?”

For some of us, we’ve spent decades being critical of Supreme Court rulings, from Whren to Heien to doggie sniffs. The unduly passionate were blissfully unaware until they had the Trump justices to hate, whereupon they hated even though they cared nothing about the Court before. Granted, Dobbs could not have been better designed to prove the haters’ worst fears right.

As for Justice Gorsuch, his majority opinion in Bostock was a horribly written and essentially incoherent decision and bought him no comfort from his haters, even though he came out on the side they demanded. Of course, when that happens, the justices merely did what should have been done anyway. When it doesn’t, the justices are illegitimate partisan hacks.

The interview was, unsurprisingly, friendly. Then again, what justice would tolerate an interview where he was the target of partisan attack and accusation? Still, it showed that Justice Gorsuch is hardly the one-dimensional scoundrel his haters believed him to be. The problem is that after this interview, his haters’ views haven’t changed despite David’s showing Gorsuch to be a  multi-dimensional human being trying to do his best, even if his best isn’t what some would want.

There is nothing that will change their cartoon character understanding of the Court, and there is nothing the justices can do to counter the unshakable belief that it’s an illegitimate court of partisan hacks rather than a conservative Court with which they are often going to disagree, as I have for decades.