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Justice Clarence Thomas has his $250,000 RV and Justice Samuel Alito has his flags. But the other seven justices have avoided controversies (other than their rulings), right? Well, no. Justice Neil Gorsuch just published a book coauthored with former clerk Janie Nitze entitled Over Ruled that is at least as controversial as what his fellow conservatives have been up to, just in a different way.
The book argues that there are too many laws and regulations and it is too hard for companies to follow them all. Gorsuch spent the summer going around and plugging the book to conservative and Republican audiences. He sounded more like someone from the Reagan administration arguing that government is bad, rather than a justice who believes his job is to judge whether some defendant has disobeyed the laws Congress wrote. Clearly, he sees his mission as telling Congress it shouldn't write so many laws that he doesn't like.
The book gives numerous misleading examples and anecdotes, often where it looks like someone was unreasonably convicted of violating some law, as Gorsuch omits key evidence showing that the defendant knew exactly what he was doing and simply found the law inconvenient. A review by CNN also makes it clear that Gorsuch distorts many of the examples to make laws and rules look bad. For example, he decried the fact that a county in Minnesota insisted that people in an Amish community in the state treat their grey water discharges via a modern septic system. Gorsuch felt their religious principles were being trampled on. He neglected to mention that untreated waste water, for example, from washing dirty cloth diapers, could seep into the local drinking water supply and make people sick. This is why the county requires modern septic systems.
He also cherry picks some of his examples. For example, he cites a 2012 article about federal regulators dealing with the cats in Ernest Hemingway's house. But if overenforcement were a rampant problem, surely he wouldn't have to go back to 2012 to find clear examples of it. There would be plenty of current ones. Also, his attack on government reach seems to have some blind spots. There are no stories about women being arrested because they had a miscarriage and local authorities saw that as an illegal abortion, part of the fallout of the Dobbs decision he signed onto. In short, the book is a political polemic for a conservative cause and not a careful treatise on regulations one might expect from a Supreme Court justice. (V)