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These Quotes From the Paper Neil Gorsuch Edited in College Are Pure Gold

Neil Gorsuch
Neil Gorsuch / AP
February 2, 2017

While he was an undergraduate student at Columbia, President Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, created the Federalist, a conservative-leaning school paper that mocked liberal campus life and Joe Biden's bad grades.

Articles by Gorsuch have surfaced since his nomination Tuesday night, many containing quotes that are too good to ignore.

Gorsuch teamed up with fellow students P.T. Waters and Andy Levy, who is now a Fox News contributor and satirist, to create the paper, the Daily Mail reported Thursday.

"We will be different," they wrote. "Our voice will be an aggressive but considered one, one that may make you think or may just make you angry."

The editors immediately challenged left-wing popular opinion, presenting counter-arguments with a thoughtfully textualist but sometimes snarky method. Most articles considered a reoccurring problem on college campuses: freedom of speech and thought.

"The Left has too long been unchallenged at Columbia," Gorsuch and his co-editors wrote. "The whining children must be told, not to shut up (we will not resort to their methods), but to show tolerance for those who place freedom of thought above joining the mob."

One issue they tackled was whether the Marines had the right to recruit on campus. While most students protested the idea because of the military's discrimination against gays, Gorsuch saw this as an issue of First Amendment rights.

"The question here is not whether the Marines should be allowed to recruit on campus' but whether a University and its community, so devoted to the freedom of individuals to pursue their own chosen lifestyles and to speak freely, has the right or obligation to determine who may speak on campus or what may be said," he wrote.

Gorsuch clarified that although his liberal peers protested discrimination, they were taking a "narrow view," and were not thinking "pragmatically" about issues because they were only focusing on the "discrimination factor."

He saw this while debates flared on campus about single-sex fraternities.

"We do not ask the Liberal to 'vindicate' himself in the eyes of a Marxist; nor do we ask the Gay and Lesbian alliance to 'justify' their lifestyle to the Catholic Ministry," he wrote. "We have, at a University like Columbia, the right to disagree, but do we have the right to impose our notions of virtue on others?"

One of the strangest findings in the paper was a joke about Donald Trump being president in a 1987 article by Levy that polled students on who would be president, the Washington Examiner reported. The idea of Trump being president was so strange that they included the response to the poll in their "Tidbits from the first Fed poll" section.

"Choice for President:

'Marx.' (And they thought Reagan was too old to run for president)

'Trump should run for pres.' (With Zeckendorf as VP, perhaps?)

'Power to the People' (would they all fit in the White House?)

'I would have loved Gore, but Tipper lost the election for him.' (from an irate "Twisted Sister" fan)

But the paper's best burn takes form in calling out former Vice President Joe Biden.

As Joseph Biden (D-Delaware), now former Presidential candidate and still Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, hinted over the last few weeks that Judge Bork lacked integrity, news that good ol' Joe had "misstated" his own credentials arose. His "degrees held" and "awards received" have been misrepresented in the past. He has been accused of plagiarism in law school, and it turns out he purloined phrases from British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock—of all people.

We find it interesting that someone who graduated from law school 75th out of 86 students—he had a little trouble remembering that, too—has the cajones to tell a Yale University Law School professor, someone whose appointment the American Bar Association gave its highest rating, what the First Amendment says.

To be fair, they also came to Biden's defense when he was mocked by the media for failing a class in his first year in law school, writing, "The demise of Joseph Biden's aspirations for the White House ... suggests that the media and the public are taking a new view on the past adventures and misadventures of present public officials. In examining details of any individual's decisions, a more reasonable and understanding line ought to be drawn between relevant and irrelevant information."

But everyone was fair game for the Federalist, and in an ironic twist, Gorsuch himself will be victim to the media as he vies to fill the shoes of the late Justice Antonin Scalia.