Tag: Neil Gorsuch

Hollowed-Out America

While Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s comments in Arizona v. Mayorkas are worth studying in full — the case is about immigration — his thoughts on the late pandemic panic stand out.

“Since March 2020,” Justice Gorsuch writes, “we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country. Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes,” and the judge goes through a long list of decrees, including:

Closing churches but not casinos
Threatening violators with both civil penalties and criminal sanctions
Surveilling church parking lots, recording license plates, and issuing warnings against attending even outdoor services.

And he adds that the federal government got in on the tyrannies.

“Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces,” he notes. “They can lead to a clamor for action — almost any action — as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat.” Gorsuch acknowledges this is not exactly a revelation: “Even the ancients warned that democracies can degenerate toward autocracy in the face of fear.”

There is a deeper problem, though, for the “concentration of power in the hands of so few may be efficient and sometimes popular. But it does not tend toward sound government.”

All the way through the pandemic, and even now, we have been barraged by messages about “misinformation and disinformation” about the disease and the treatments (proactive and reactive) against it. And the people in power — bureaucrats as well as politicians — were called “experts” while actual experts (along with earnest amateurs) were hounded, their ideas suppressed.

Now we know that much of what was then held as good information was in error, even lies.

Very unsound governance: Gorsuch characterizes it “a shell of a democracy.”

“Hollow.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Exhibit A+

“Do you really want me to rule the country?” Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch pointedly asked CNN’s Ariane de Vogue.

“It is not a judge’s job to do whatever he or she thinks is good,” Gorsuch added, in response to her concern that judicial activism might sometimes be “needed.”

“We wrote a Constitution; we put down what we wanted to put in it,” explained President Trump’s first SCOTUS pick. “We can amend it when we wish, and it is not up to nine people to tell 330 million Americans how to live.”

Gorsuch is making the media rounds promoting his new book, A Republic, If You Can Keep It — borrowing Ben Franklin’s famous quip when asked about what form of government the delegates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention had produced.

Gorsuch follows the judicial philosophy of originalism, criticizing interpretations that jigger the Constitution with the times. “You know, the living Constitution is going to take your rights away,” the justice argues, “and it’s going to add ones that aren’t there.”

And defending the rights actually in the Constitution means, Gorsuch believes, that judges must enforce limits on government. Last weekend in The Wall Street Journal, Kyle Peterson noted that Gorsuch has been true to that mission, pushing back against the High Court’s longtime deference to the administrative state.

This philosophy puts him beyond partisanship. “Gorsuch voted with liberal justices on important decisions on surveillance and sentencing,” Jonathan Turley writes in The Hill. “He also joined in key decisions supporting free speech against the government. . . .”

All this makes Neil Gorsuch the best justice on the Supreme Court. Perhaps the best in my lifetime.

And surely Exhibit A in Mr. Trump’s case for reelection.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability folly ideological culture judiciary national politics & policies term limits U.S. Constitution

A Trout in the Milk

Senate Judiciary Committee , Supreme Court, hearings, term limits, Neil Gorsuch

This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee grilled Judge Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court. Talk about a silly rite. Senators repeatedly fired questions about specific legal views that no High Court nominee ever answers.

Why not? Because to answer would be to pre-judge possible future cases.

That didn’t prevent displays of faux-outrage from committee Democrats, though. “You have been very much able to avoid any specificity,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) criticized, “like no one I have ever seen before.”

In Washington, isn’t that a compliment?

Into this kabuki theater, Republicans added their own inanity. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) inquired of Gorsuch, “What’s the largest trout you’ve ever caught?”

So that is how to determine whether to confirm someone for a lifetime position.

But even a lifetime doesn’t beat Congress. Elected every two years in the House or six years in the Senate, congresspersons often rack up longer tenure than do justices appointed for life.

The longest serving justice in our history was William O. Douglas, who spent nearly 37 years on the High Court. But if Douglas had spent that epoch in Congress, he wouldn’t place first, but 80th.

In fact, three Judiciary Committee members — Senators Patrick Leahy, Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch — have already served longer than any High Court justice in American history.

Interestingly, of the 20 longest serving justices, half served before 1900. Conversely, all of the 20 longest continuously serving members of Congress served after 1900.

Careerism in Congress beats lifetime tenure.

It’s time for term limits.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags hearings, Neil Gorsuch, Senate Judiciary Committee, Supreme Court, term limits

crime and punishment ideological culture judiciary national politics & policies Second Amendment rights Tenth Amendment federalism term limits U.S. Constitution

Perry Mason for the Court

Neil Gorsuch, Perry Mason, Supreme Court, Judge, nomination, Trump

Legend has it that a juror once ran up to attorney Neil Gorsuch, after Gorsuch won a case proving a gravel pit owner had been cheated, declaring, “You’re Perry Mason.”

These days, Gorsuch sits on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, and is President Donald Trump’s nominee for the late Justice Scalia’s seat on the nation’s highest court.

And now Gorsuch is receiving testimonials worthy of the indefatigable TV lawyer.

Brad Smith, the chairman of the Center for Competitive Politics, expressed his pleasure “that President Trump has nominated someone who will defend a robust First Amendment.”

Ballot access expert Richard Winger noted that Gorsuch has a “good record in cases involving independent candidates and minor parties.”

“I am hard-pressed to think of one thing President Trump has done right in the last 11 days since his inauguration,” wrote Neal Katyal in the New York Times. “Until Tuesday,” continued the Georgetown law professor, “when he nominated an extraordinary judge and man, Neil Gorsuch, to be a justice on the Supreme Court.”

Katyal, who had served as an acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, added that Gorsuch’s record of holding government officials accountable “should give the American people confidence that he will not compromise principle to favor the president who appointed him.”*

Even I have pertinent testimony: back in 1992, Gorsuch argued (in a co-authored Cato Institute paper) that term limits were “constitutionally permissible” as “institutional constraints on the power of government” that “the Framers,” if alive today, would likely see as “necessary preconditions for liberty.”

No, Gorsuch is not actually Perry Mason — I never knew where Perry stood on term limits.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* On Reason’s Hit & Run blog, Damon Root strongly agreed.

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