Gorsuch's wise words

Boston Globe

20-02-2025

The
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What exactly did Gorsuch mean? The quote was in reference to a Supreme Court decision regarding the use of a public health law to limit the entry of migrants into the country during the COVID-19 emergency. But what makes Gorsuch's statement interesting and important has less to do with Kennedy, health care policy, or the battle over immigration than it does with Gorsuch himself.
Read closely and in full, Gorsuch's
In his statement, Gorsuch expressed his dismay with the rapid proliferation of presidential orders issued in response to alleged emergencies. This trend threatened civil liberties in ways Congress, state legislatures, and the public did not seem to comprehend, Gorsuch warned.
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The justice, who was nominated by Trump during his first term, was mainly upset by state and federal vaccination and lockdown mandates during the pandemic. 'They deployed a public-health agency to regulate landlord-tenant relations nationwide,' he wrote. 'They used a workplace-safety agency to issue a vaccination mandate for most working Americans.'
State and local officials went further, enforcing lockdowns, closing schools and businesses, barring church services, and threatening criminal action against violators of strict social distancing rules. 'Since March 2020,' he asserted, 'we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.'
But the problem of emergency executive orders did not begin with the pandemic, he argued. As long ago as 1970, Congress concluded that 'emergency decrees have a habit of long outliving the crises that generate them.' He noted that while major emergencies demand swift and decisive executive action, emergency orders should not as a rule replace the more deliberative — and democratic — process of enacting legislation.
'However wise one person or his advisors may be, that is no substitute for the wisdom of the whole of the American people that can be tapped in the legislative process,' Gorsuch wrote.
How then might Gorsuch respond to the tide of executive orders flowing from the White House in Trump 2.0? Since taking office a month ago, the president has signed at least
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Already, legal challenges have been filed against many of those orders, and according to The New York Times, the courts have
Given the Republican-controlled Congress's clear unwillingness to oppose the president on any matter, the Supreme Court remains the last check on Trump's efforts to radically expand the power of the presidency. It is impossible to know where Gorsuch will position himself in those decisions to come, and it would be reasonable to imagine him siding with the administration on some and not on others.
But one hopes that he will remember his own warnings about unbridled executive power, which regardless of how one viewed them in 2023 now seem strangely prescient. 'Decisions produced by those who indulge no criticism are rarely as good as those produced after robust and uncensored debate,' he wrote. 'Autocracies have always suffered these defects. Maybe, hopefully, we have relearned these lessons too.'
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