Gorsuch Condemns the ‘Breathtaking’ Use of Emergency Powers During Covid

[Timber Rattler]

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/gorsuch-condemns-the-breathtaking-use-of-emergency-powers-during-covid/

Justice Neil Gorsuch has penned a passionate polemic against the emergency powers that were widely used during the Covid-19 pandemic, saying that while they may have solved some problems, they created many others.

Gorsuch’s statement came in the Supreme Court’s final word on the effort of a group of states to challenge the end of Title 42, which allowed migrants to be expelled on public-health grounds. Last December, the conservative justices blocked the administration from lifting Title 42 and scheduled oral arguments. However, the justices removed the case from the argument calendar in February after the Biden administration announced it planned to end the Covid-19 national emergency. The justices closed the book on the case Thursday, days after Title 42 expired.

Gorsuch dissented in December and was relieved at the Supreme Court’s decision to render the case moot. He wrote that he does not discount the concerns of states like Arizona, a party in the case, about what is happening at the border. However, he said, “the current border crisis is not a COVID crisis.”

According to Gorsuch, the states attempted “to manipulate our docket to prolong an emergency decree designed for one crisis in order to address an entirely different one,” adding that the Court took a serious misstep in granting certiorari in December.

But for the justice, Title 42 was only one part of a much larger problem of emergency powers being misused.

“Since March 2020, 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,” wrote Gorsuch, recounting the lockdowns, the closure and surveillance of churches, and the shuttering of schools.

Gorsuch pointed to the many excesses at the federal level: a public-health agency being deployed to regulate landlord-tenant relations nationwide and a workplace-safety agency issuing a vaccination mandate for most working Americans. “Along the way, it seems federal officials may have pressured social-media companies to suppress information about pandemic policies with which they disagreed,” wrote Gorsuch.

EXCERPT

PDF Link to his opinion: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/22-592_5hd5.pdf

I like Gorsuch a lot.  He's from Colorado and brings a western U.S./flyover country perspective to the SCOTUS.  And his opinions are full of common sense.