Stern agreed with Gorsuch, stating that "Alito does not want the court to stretch Title VII beyond its application—as expected by Congress in 1964—and that approach is not textualism", adding that Alito's opinion "elevates the alleged mental processes of long-dead lawmakers over the ordinary meaning of words". Michael D. Shear, a White House correspondent for "The New York Times", stated that "Justice Gorsuch employed a fundamentally conservative principle—a literal reading of the words of a statute—to reach a decision that contrasts sharply with the conclusions of the other conservative justices on the court". Carrie Severino, the president of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network and a former law clerk of Justice Thomas, said that "Justice Scalia would be disappointed that his successor has bungled textualism so badly today, for the sake of appealing to college campuses and editorial boards". Jonathan Skrmetti, Chief Deputy Attorney General of Tennessee (which, with a number of other states, had filed an "amicus" brief on behalf of the employers in "Bostock"), observed that all three opinions in "Bostock" adopted a textualist approach. Echoing a comment made by Justice Elena Kagan in memorializing Justice Scalia, Skrmetti argued that "Bostock" shows "we really are all textualists now." He characterized Gorsuch's majority opinion in "Bostock" as "glorifying textualism in its narrowest literalist conception." Gorsuch's majority opinion, Skrmetti argues, means that this "narrow" form of textualism—which, on Skrmetti's view, does not look to legislative history or other potential sources of the meaning of the statute—is now ascendant. However, Skrmetti notes that where a statute is ambiguous, such tools might still be available to judges in interpreting statutes.