As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch sees it, an explosion in the complexity of the nation\u2019s regulations is overburdening Americans and often trampling their rights and livelihoods.<\/p>\n
Less than a century ago, the laws of the United States could fit into a single book, but since then they have swelled to fill enough volumes to take up an entire shelf in his office, Gorsuch said Thursday night during a conversation at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif.<\/p>\n
The Federal Register listing government regulations is now about 60,000 pages, and the number of federal crimes has grown to roughly 5,000 by some estimates, said Gorsuch, who is promoting a book, \u201cOver Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law,\u201d which he co-wrote with a former clerk, Janie Nitze.<\/p>\n
Gorsuch said that ever-expanding system has created a Kafkaesque maze, where Americans sometimes violate rules and regulations they didn\u2019t know existed, compliance has become overly onerous, and even regulators sometimes don\u2019t know the laws they are tasked with enforcing.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been a judge now coming on 20 years,\u201d he told the Reagan Library audience. \u201cI\u2019ve just seen so many cases come through my courtroom where ordinary Americans \u2014 decent, hardworking people who are trying to do their best \u2014 are just getting \u2026 thwacked by laws unexpectedly.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gorsuch illustrated his point by delving into several real-life vignettes from his book, involving magicians, monks and a hair-braider who found themselves in fights \u2014 sometimes surreal \u2014 with regulators.<\/p>\n
He told the story of a commercial fisherman in Florida who was charged under a law, passed after the Enron corporate accounting scandal, that forbids the destruction of documents and \u201ctangible objects\u201d to impede a federal investigation. The man\u2019s alleged crime: disposing of fish.<\/p>\n
The government alleged that John Yates destroyed evidence by dumping his catch after a routine inspection found that the fish were smaller than the legal limit, then replacing them with other fish, a contention Yates denied. Prosecutors argued that the fish were tangible objects under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.<\/p>\n
Yates was eventually convicted and served 30 days in jail, but he appealed his case to the Supreme Court, which overturned his conviction in 2015, finding that the law was never meant to apply to such circumstances. By then, the legal drama had upended Yates\u2019s life and career as a fisherman.<\/p>\n
Gorsuch said the heavy reliance on laws has many causes, but it may have to do with the nation\u2019s fraying bonds of community and trust. He lamented the downfall of churchgoing, the decline in social clubs and the deepening political divide in recent decades.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf I trust you and my local community and we can work together to solve problems, we don\u2019t need to resort to law for everything,\u201d Gorsuch said. \u201cWe have a lot of work to do on civility and civics.\u201d<\/p>\n
The justice said too many schools have dropped civics classes, and he urged people to lobby their local districts to reinstate them. He said it was shocking that, as surveys have shown, many Americans cannot name all three branches of government.<\/p>\n
The appearance at the library was part of a series of interviews by the Donald Trump-appointed conservative, who like other justices rarely speaks to the media. In the recent blitz to promote his book, Gorsuch has expressed reservations about President Joe Biden\u2019s plans to overhaul the Supreme Court and defended a blockbuster ruling from the high court in July that granted Trump broad immunity from criminal prosecution for his official acts as president.<\/p>\n
Gorsuch, who became a Supreme Court justice in 2017, told Fox News in an interview aired Sunday that he would not offer an opinion on Biden\u2019s proposed changes for the court, which include 18-year term limits for justices and a stronger enforcement mechanism for its ethics code, but he worried about the impact of any overhaul, saying it could make the judiciary less independent.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s there for the moments when the spotlight\u2019s on you, when the government\u2019s coming after you,\u201d Gorsuch said of the court system. \u201cDon\u2019t you want a ferociously independent judge and a jury of your peers to make those decisions? Isn\u2019t that your right as an American? And so I just say, be careful.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gorsuch\u2019s comments came after Justice Elena Kagan struck a different tone, recently telling an audience in California that she would support the creation of a committee of judges to examine potential violations of the court\u2019s ethics code, which critics have complained is toothless.<\/p>\n
In a second interview with Fox News, aired Tuesday, Gorsuch defended the court\u2019s decision on presidential immunity, which arose out of a criminal case against Trump related to his efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election.<\/p>\n
Gorsuch framed the decision as an outgrowth of a Nixon-era ruling by the court that insulated presidents from civil suits after they leave office, so as not to chill their actions while in office.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll the court did in this case was simply apply that same precedent and idea to the criminal context,\u201d Gorsuch said.<\/p>\n
The Supreme Court has sharply curtailed the power of federal agencies in major rulings in recent terms.<\/p>\n
The court struck down a 40-year-old bedrock of administrative law known as the Chevron doctrine that required courts to give broad deference to federal agencies\u2019 interpretations of ambiguous statutes.<\/p>\n
The court has also put on hold a major plan by the Environmental Protection Agency to combat smog-forming pollution that drifts across state lines, curtailed the EPA\u2019s ability to regulate greenhouse gases and limited its powers to protect wetlands. It also invalidated the Securities and Exchange Commission\u2019s use of in-house tribunals to go after securities fraud, among other actions.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch sees it, an explosion in the complexity of the nation\u2019s regulations is overburdening Americans and often trampling their rights and livelihoods. Less than a century ago, the laws of the United States could fit into a single book, but since then they have swelled to fill enough […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7616,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7615"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7615\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}