There are plenty of reasons to be wary of Neil Gorsuch.

In the more than three thousand cases he’s decided on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, Gorsuch has slanted decidedly right. He has actively defended the death penalty, opposes assisted suicide, and generally supports “tough-on-crime” laws. A religious conservative, he’d almost certainly try to curtail abortion and other reproductive rights as a Supreme Court justice. And if his confirmation hearings this week go according to plan, he’d be approved at the age of forty-nine — setting him up for a decades-long tenure on the nation’s highest court.

Perhaps most troubling, however, is the originalist philosophy that Gorsuch — who comes hand-picked from the right-wing Federalist Society — espouses to justify his conservative decisions.