Gorsuch gives scathing overview of COVID-era: ‘Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces’
Posted 17 days ago
From WWW.FOXNEWS.COM
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch used a statement in a lawsuit over the Title 42 public health order to give a scathing overview of how civil liberties were trampled during the COVID-era — and the lessons that America could learn from it.
"One lesson might be this: Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces. They can lead to a clamor for action—almost any action—as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat," the justice wrote.
"A leader or an expert who claims he can fix everything, if only we do exactly as he says, can prove an irresistible force. We do not need to confront a bayonet, we need only a nudge, before we willingly abandon the nicety of requiring laws to be adopted by our legislative representatives and accept rule by decree.
Gorsuch was writing as the justices dismissed a pending appeal over the ending of the Title 42 public health order — which was used between March 2020 and May this year to expel migrants quickly at the southern border. It ended along with the expiration of the COVID-19 national emergency.
The Biden administration had sought to end the order in 2022 but was blocked after an appeal from Republican states. It then faced an ACLU lawsuit, from which a court ordered that Title 42 be ended in December. But the Supreme Court accepted a request for a stay by 19 Republican states, who argued that the state could intervene to challenge the summary judgment order. The court was expected to rule in its own terms, but that has been abandoned after the order's expiration on its own terms.
While Gorsuch focused on the legal back-and-forth over that had followed Title 42, he then turned his attention to the response to the pandemic as a whole, writing that the case "illustrates the disruption we have experienced over the last three years in how our laws are made and our freedoms observed."
He then gave examples of how the U. S. 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. They shuttered businesses and schools, public and private. They closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on. They threatened violators not just with civil penalties but with criminal sanctions too. They surveilled church parking lots, recorded license plates, and issued notices warning that attendance at even outdoor services satisfying all state social-distancing and hygiene requirements could amount to criminal conduct. They divided cities and neighborhoods into color-coded zones, forced individuals to fight for their freedoms in court on emergency timetables, and then changed their color-coded schemes when defeat in court seemed imminent," he said.... (Read more)
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