This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, February 6th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Neil Gorsuch, President Trump's nominee for the US Supreme Court has a long track record, but there are a few potential reasons for

concern about his nomination based on his own writing.

Ilia Somen, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, discusses the Gorsuch nomination and the broader judicial wars in the Senate.

I've spoken with Cato's Ilia Shapiro and Andrew Grossman, both of which have read a great deal of the opinions of Neil Gorsuch, who has been

nominated to the US Supreme Court by President Trump.

So what are your big takeaways from having looked at some of his past opinions?

I would say that he's a conservative.

For the most part, he thinks of himself as a tactuist and an originalist as well.

The most distinctive thing about his opinions

is his hostility to Chevron deference,

which is this longstanding doctrine

that when a federal law is ambiguous when things are unclear you defer to an

administrative agency's interpretation of the law so long as that

interpretation is quote-unquote reasonable. Clearly Judge Gorsuch is not a fan of this doctrine.

His ideas are very much a challenge

to the dominant Orthodox view in this field.

I think overall he's probably right about this, but this is the one area where somebody could plausibly say he's in some

sense out of the mainstream.

Okay, and that idea of Chevron deference deference to administrative agencies with reasonable

interpretations of vague laws that sort of gets at the delegation issue.

...