# Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch Drops Banger of a Dissent, Internet Immediately Declares Him a Hero (For Five Minutes)
Look, I know we’re all supposed to hate Supreme Court justices equally these days, regardless of which side of the bench they’re warming. It’s the law of the land: you’re either a partisan hack or a corporate shill, and God forbid you write something that doesn’t immediately make everyone on Twitter lose their minds. But then Neil Gorsuch—yes, *that* Neil Gorsuch, the guy Trump picked from that creepy list the Federalist Society handed him on a cocktail napkin—went and did something that broke the matrix. He wrote a dissent so spicy, so unhinged in its moral clarity, that even the libs had to stop and say, “Wait, did that guy just… get it?”
Let me set the scene. We’re talking about *Lackey v. Stinnie*, a case that sounds like it should be a buddy cop movie about two guys who get lost in the woods but is actually about whether you can screw over poor people who win a lawsuit by making them wait years for the government to pay up. The majority—because of course—said, “Yeah, nah, you don’t actually have to pay the winning plaintiffs if you drag your feet long enough.” It’s the judicial equivalent of the checkout line at Walmart where the cashier just walks away mid-transaction. But Gorsuch? Gorsuch flipped the table.
In his dissent, which is already being screenshotted and memed into oblivion, Gorsuch basically said, “Hey, remember the Constitution? The one where we promised not to be total ghouls?” He argued that the state of Virginia—yes, the same Virginia that gave us Thomas Jefferson and also a lot of really bad traffic—refused to pay a group of low-income folks who proved the state was violating their rights. These weren’t some Wall Street fat cats crying about their bonus structure. We’re talking about people who needed driver’s licenses and the state was like, “Lol, get in line.” The district court ordered the state to pay their legal fees, as the law requires. Virginia appealed, and the Fourth Circuit said, “We’ll get back to you.” Then the case dragged on so long that the plaintiffs literally *died* waiting. I’m not even joking. Some of them didn’t live to see a dime.
And the Supreme Court’s response? “Oh well, guess the state doesn’t have to pay now because the case is moot.” Moot. As in, “Oops, you were too poor and too old and too sick to wait for justice, so justice is canceled.” It’s like if a landlord evicted you for not paying rent, but then you died, and the court said, “Well, he doesn’t have to pay the back rent because he’s not alive to collect it.” That’s not justice, that’s a horror movie directed by Kafka.
Enter Gorsuch. The man, the myth, the guy who looks like he’s about to ask you for your manager at a Cracker Barrel. He wrote, and I quote: “The Court today holds that the defendants’ flagrant, prolonged, and conceded violation of federal law is not remediable. That is not a ruling any court should be proud of.” He went on to say the majority’s logic would allow states to “run out the clock on any judgment they dislike.” Translation: if you’re a broke mom trying to get food stamps, and the state screws you over, just wait long enough and the Supreme Court will give the state a participation trophy.
Now, here’s where the internet lost its collective mind. The usual suspects—the “I’m a centrist, I think both sides are equally bad” crowd—immediately started posting the dissent with captions like, “Based Gorsuch.” People who literally spent the last six years screaming about how Gorsuch was a monster for that *TransAm* trucking case were suddenly, “Actually, this guy has a point.” It was beautiful and terrible. The cognitive dissonance was so loud you could hear it from space.
But let’s not kid ourselves. This isn’t Gorsuch suddenly becoming the second coming of RBG. This is a conservative justice who, for one shining moment, remembered that the Constitution says something about due process and not letting the government screw over individuals just because it’s inconvenient. It’s the same guy who wrote the opinion that made it easier for employers to force workers into arbitration, meaning you can’t sue them even if they steal your lunch money. He’s still the guy who thinks corporations are people, my friend, just maybe people who need to be told to pay their parking tickets.
But here’s the thing: when the system is this broken, even a broken clock is right twice a day. And Gorsuch, for all his flaws, just hit a bullseye. The majority’s logic was so flimsy that it essentially said, “The state can violate the law, and then wait until you die, and then we high-five each other and go to lunch.” That’s not a legal principle; that’s a supervillain origin story.
The internet, predictably, did what it does best: overreact, meme, and then forget. Within 24 hours, someone had photoshopped Gorsuch’s face onto a “This is fine” dog meme. Someone else made a TikTok of him slow-clapping into a sunset. A few brave souls tried to argue that this was actually a secret plot to undermine the administrative state, but they were drowned out by the sheer chaos of people realizing that a Trump appointee just agreed that poor people shouldn’t be screwed over by the government. It’s like finding out your racist uncle actually makes a decent meatloaf. You’re still mad about the other stuff, but you’re also hungry.
The real lesson here? We’re so desperate for any shred of moral consistency that we’ll lionize anyone who shows it, even if they’re
Final Thoughts
Having tracked the Court for decades, what strikes me about Gorsuch isn't just his formidable intellect or his textualist rigor, but the quiet certainty with which he applies it—a jurist who seems utterly unbothered by the political tempest swirling around his rulings. His opinions, from religious liberty to Native American law, often read less as partisan salvos and more as a singular, principled quest to cabin government power, even when that angers his ideological allies. In the end, Gorsuch may well be remembered not as the man who filled a stolen seat, but as the Justice who, with a rare blend of literary flair and unyielding logic, forced a polarized Court to confront the messy, often inconvenient meaning of its own words.