Opinion | Justice Neil Gorsuch on the ‘Miracle’ of Agreement on the Court

French: Can I stop you right there?

Gorsuch: No, let me finish three. Let me finish three. We can talk about two. Two is very important. But so’s three. He said: You write 10 times better than I do. And Jefferson said, oh, all right, I’ll do it. All right, now you can tap in.

French: OK. Well, was that humility or strategy or a combination to say that Jefferson writes?

Gorsuch: Well, I think No. 1 is humility, for sure, and probably true. No. 2 was strategic, for sure, right? I mean, you had had the Boston Tea Party, and all the goings-on in Lexington and Concord. What is it to a Virginian, right? You’ve got to drag everybody along, and you have to remember — everybody thinks we live in divided times, fine, we can talk about that, but back then, only about 40 percent of the colonists were backing the Patriot cause, even in June and July of 1776. Another percent were devoted Loyalists. And then the balance of the country was somewhere in between. Sound familiar? Yeah.

French: Yeah, absolutely. So, Virginia nationalizes this, in other words. It takes it away from being a Massachusetts rebellion, those ornery Puritans, and it turns into an American Revolution.

Now, the other thing that struck me is that Jefferson kind of squirrels away and does the writing on his own. And so, these really seminal words, this American mission statement, we’re “endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.” This really does seem to be Jefferson’s heart expressed on paper, not writing by committee.

Gorsuch: Well, there’s some of that too, right? This is later on, and he called the “mutilations” what people did to it, all right? You know, we think of the Declaration as this wonderful — “mutilations.” Anyway, but yes, he locked himself in rooms he had rented from a bricklayer on the outskirts of Philadelphia, and he did it in two weeks, and he said he didn’t consult any book or pamphlet. He tried merely to come up with an expression of the American mind. And I don’t think he was thinking about just his mind. I think he was thinking about how people were thinking at the time. And in that, he came up with three, I think, perfect ideas: that we’re all created equal, every one of us, and that each of us has inalienable rights given to us by God, not privileges from government, and that we have a right to rule ourselves.