"Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country," wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch (pictured above) in an eight-page tour de force, excoriating local, state and federal authorities as well as social media companies for using the COVID pandemic to exert authoritarian control over Americans.
Gorsuch stressed that "the current border crisis is not a COVID crisis" – and in his view, the court "took a serious misstep when it effectively allowed [the states] to manipulate our docket to prolong an emergency decree designed for one crisis in order to address an entirely different one."
American Family Radio host Jenna Ellis says the rebuke is better late than never.
"This was an amazing opinion. I think it was fantastic from Justice Gorsuch. It was beautifully articulated," says the former attorney for President Donald Trump. "My only problem is: I wish he had been willing to say this three years ago."
Gorsuch wrote the government used pandemic restrictions as a proxy for the police state the Left has been sneaking toward since the Obama administration. "Fear and desire for safety are powerful forces," the justice wrote. "They can lead to a clamor for action – almost any action – as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat."
Attorney Daniel Schmid of Liberty Counsel offers this reaction to AFN: "Over and over and over again we saw the intrusion of liberties, and to some degree it came with the applause of most of the American people – and it was driven by fear."
The Liberty Counsel attorney says Gorsuch's closing sentence, quoted below, sums up the still-looming threat:
"The rule by indefinite emergency risks leaving us all with a shell of democracy and civil liberties that are just as hollow."
