Sophia Tesfaye at Salon has an interesting scoop on Justice Neil Gorsuch's book tour getting some blow back from the right:

In interview after interview, he has described the United States as a "creedal nation" rooted not on race, ancestry or religion but on the ideals laid out in the Declaration of Independence: equality, natural rights and self-government. "Our nation is not founded on a religion," Gorsuch told Reason. "It's not based on a common culture, even, or heritage. It's based on those ideas."

The response from his intended audience was instructive. Steve Cortes, a former adviser to Donald Trump and JD Vance, proclaimed on X that it is "amazing how wrong" Gorsuch is and that America is "clearly a Christian nation founded on the principles of Western Civilization, with the culture and mores of Europe." Fox News' Will Cain challenged the justice to a debate on the topic. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation -- an institution that has spent decades positioning itself as the intellectual backbone of American conservatism and birthed Project 2025 -- wrote that Gorsuch's view was "completely divorced from our founding." Curtis Yarvin, the monarchist pro-Trump blogger -- and vice presidential friend -- whose ideas have traveled with alarming speed from dissident blog posts to White House adjacency, declared that Gorsuch's comments gave off "cuck energy." Jeremy Carl, the conservative commentator who had to withdraw from a State Department position this year after scrutiny over remarks about protecting "white identity," called it "the broad intellectual failure of the conservative legal movement."

I'm sure Gorsuch sees himself as Goldilocks: if he's angering both the right and left he must be doing it juuuust right. That's an old GOP trick to make their radical policies sound moderate. There's always a wingnut out there ready to do the party a solid and I'm sure Roberts and the boys (and girl) are grateful.

But in the short run, as Tesfaye points out, this may actually signal some good news. This "creedal nation" thing has been around for decades and it's always been a bit of a wink and a nod to the Christian right. Today's party doesn't like winks and nods, they want a sledgehammer to the head. But as these right wingers correctly surmised, it's highly likely this is also a signal that the Supremes aren't going to rule against birthright citizenship. Tesfaye's insight here is important:

That's why Gorsuch's remarks felt so threatening to these figures. His language implicitly reaffirmed a vision of citizenship based on civic membership rather than ethnic inheritance. During oral arguments, Gorsuch pointed out that the word "domicile" -- the legal concept at the heart of the Trump administration"s entire theory -- appears nowhere in the congressional debates over the Fourteenth Amendment. "The absence" of that word, he said, "is striking."

The response to all of this on the right has been to conclude not that the Trump administration's legal theory is bad -- which it is, and which even many conservative legal scholars have acknowledged -- but that Gorsuch, who was appointed to the Court by Trump in 2018, is a traitor. The president has said publicly that he regrets listening to the Federalist Society when making his first-term appointments, calling them "weak, stupid and bad" and "an embarrassment to their families."

It's bigger than the birthright case so get ready for full blown mass MAGA hysteria led by the whiner in chief. He won't understand the deeper implications of this but the so-called "intelligentsia" of the movement certainly will. Bring it on.

Read the whole piece. It's excellent.