Americans ‘are oppressed’ by too many laws and regulations, Judge Gorsuch says in new book

WASHINGTON (AP) — Ordinary Americans are “get hit in the ass” too many laws and regulations, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch says in a new book, emphasizing his skepticism of federal agencies and the power they exercise.

“Too little law and we are not safe and our freedoms are not protected” Gorsuch told The Associated Press in an interview in his Supreme Court office. “But too much law actually weakens those same things.”

“Overdose: The Human Toll of Too Many Laws” will be released Tuesday by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Gorsuch received an advance of $500,000 for the book, according to his annual financial statements.

In the interview, Gorsuch declined to be drawn into discussions about term limits or an enforceable ethics code for judges, which President Joe Biden recently proposed at a time of diminished public confidence in the court. Justice Elena Kagan, speaking days before Biden, separately said the court’s ethics code, adopted by the justices last November, should have some form of enforcement.

But Gorsuch spoke about the importance of judicial independence. “I’m not saying there aren’t ways to improve what we have. I’m just saying we’ve been given something very special. It’s the envy of the world, of the United States judiciary.” he said.

The 56-year-old justice was the first of then-President Donald Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees, who joined forces to solidify a conservative majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, ended affirmative action in college admissions, expanded gun rights and curbed environmental regulations aimed at combating climate change as well as air and water pollution more broadly.

A month ago, the Supreme Court ended a term in which Gorsuch and five other conservative justices on the court delivered sharp rebukes of the administrative state in three important cases, including a decision that overturned a 40-year-old Chevron decision that made it more likely that courts would uphold regulation. The court’s three liberal justices dissented in each case.

Gorsuch was also in the majority ruling that former presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution in a decision that indefinitely delayed the election interference case against Trump. In addition, the justices made it harder to use a federal obstruction charge against people who were part of the mob that violently stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to overturn Trump’s loss to Biden in the 2020 election.

Gorsuch defended the immunity ruling, saying it was necessary to prevent presidents from being limited in their office by threats of prosecution after they leave office.

The court had to face an unprecedented situation, he added. “For the first time in our history, we have a presidential administration that is bringing criminal charges against a previous president. That’s a serious question, right? Serious implications.” Gorsuch said.

But in the book, co-authored by former law clerk Janie Nitze, Gorusch largely sidesteps these big issues and focuses on a fisherman, a magician, an Amish farmer, an immigrant, a braider and others who risked prison, hefty fines, deportation and other hardships because of unyielding principles.

Gorsuch said that in his 18 years as a judge, including the last seven on the Supreme Court, “There were a lot of cases where I saw ordinary Americans, just ordinary people, trying to live their lives, not trying to hurt anyone or do anything bad, and they just got hit unexpectedly by some law that they didn’t know about.”

The problem, he said, is that there has been an explosion of legislation and regulation, both at the federal and state levels. The sheer volume of congressional work over the past decade has been overwhelming, he said, an average of 344 pieces of legislation, totaling 2 million to 3 million words a year.

One of the vignettes is about John Yates, a Florida fisherman who was convicted of getting rid of an undersized groper under a federal law originally aimed at the accounting industry and destroying evidence in the Enron scandal. Yates’ case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where he won by one vote.

“I wanted to tell the story of people whose lives were touched” Gorsuch said.

The book expands on a theme that has permeated Gorsuch’s opinions over the years, from his criticism of the Chevron decision while serving on the federal appeals court in Denver to his May 2023 statement in which he called the extraordinary measures taken during the COVID-19 crisis, which has killed more than a million Americans, possibly “the greatest violations of civil liberties in the history of peace in this country.”

While Gorsuch has voted with other conservative justices in most of the court’s major cases, he has also sided with liberals in important cases, including one in which he wrote an opinion in 2020 that extended workplace discrimination protections to LGBTQ people. Gorsuch has also sided with liberal justices in all of the court’s cases involving Native Americans since he joined the court.

Another area where he tended to diverge from his conservative colleagues was on immigration, especially when deportation opponents complained they had not been given sufficient notice of the hearings.

Gorsuch recently returned from a summer teaching assignment in Porto, Portugal, at George Mason University Law School. Last year, he spent two weeks in Lisbon, Portugal, as part of the same program, for which he received nearly $30,000, plus food, lodging and travel.

Later this week, he will travel to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, to talk about the new book.

He said that the day he met with the AP, he wore a tie for the first time in weeks. He wore a dark blue suit, cowboy boots and a Western belt.

He seemed at ease, treating guests to chocolate chip cookies and coffee and joking with a reporter who talked about his upcoming trip to the New Jersey coast. “Go and hang some flags there” Gorsuch said, referring to the controversy over flags similar to those carried by rioters on Jan. 6 that were displayed in front of the homes of Justice Samuel Alito and his wife.

Gorsuch isn’t the only judge to release a book this summer. Judge Ketanja Brown Jackson’s memoir, “Cute,” will be published next month.

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