Americans are ‘getting whacked’ by too many laws and regulations, Justice Gorsuch says in a new book

WASHINGTON — Ordinary Americans are being ‘hit’ by too many laws and regulations, Supreme Court says Judge Neil Gorsuch he says in a new book, in which he underscores his skepticism about federal agencies and the power they wield.

“Too little law and we’re not safe, and our liberties are not protected,” Gorsuch told The Associated Press in an interview in his Supreme Court office. “But too much law and you harm those same things.”

“Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law” is published Tuesday by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Gorsuch received a $500,000 advance for the book, according to his annual financial disclosure reports.

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

But Gorsuch did speak to 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, the American judiciary,” he said.

The 56-year-old justice was the first of three Supreme Court nominees by then-President Donald Trump. Together, they formed a conservative majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, ended affirmative action in college admissions, expanded gun rights and curbed environmental regulations aimed at tackling climate change and air and water pollution more broadly.

A month ago, the Supreme Court concluded its case a term in which Gorsuch and the court’s five other conservative justices sharply decried the administrative state in three landmark cases, including the decision overturning the 40-year-old Chevron decision that had made it more likely that courts would enforce regulations. The court’s three liberal justices dissented in each case.

Gorsuch also ruled in the majority that former presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution in a decision that indefinitely delayed Trump’s election interference case. The justices also made it more difficult to bring federal obstruction charges against people who were part of the mob that violently attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn Trump’s defeat to Biden in the 2020 election.

Gorsuch defended the immunity ruling, arguing that it is necessary to prevent presidents from being hobbled while in office by threats of prosecution if they leave office.

The court was grappling with an unprecedented situation, he said. “Here we have, for the first time in our history, a presidential administration bringing criminal charges against a previous president. It’s a serious question, right? Serious implications,” Gorsuch said.

But in the book, authored by former paralegal Janie Nitze, Gorusch largely sets aside those bigger issues and focuses on a fisherman, a magician, Amish farmers, immigrants, a hair braider and others who faced jail time, hefty fines, deportation and other hardships because of tough rules.

In the 18 years that Gorsuch has served as a justice, including the last seven on the Supreme Court, he said, “I’ve just had so many cases come to me where I see ordinary Americans, ordinary, everyday people trying to live their lives, not wanting to hurt anybody or do anything wrong, and they’re just unexpectedly punished by some rule of law that they didn’t know about.”

The problem, he said, is that there has been an explosion of legislation and regulations, both at the federal and state levels. The sheer volume of Congressional output over the past decade has been overwhelming, he said, averaging 344 laws totaling 2 to 3 million words per year.

One vignette features John Yates, a Florida fisherman convicted of disposing of undersized groupers under a federal law originally aimed at the accounting industry and the destruction of 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 impacted,” Gorsuch said.

The book continues a theme that has been a running theme in Gorsuch’s opinions for years, from his criticism of the Chevron decision while he was serving on a federal appeals court in Denver to his statement in May 2023, calling the emergency measures taken during the COVID-19 crisis that have killed more than 1 million Americans “perhaps the greatest violations of civil liberties in the history of this country’s peace.”

While Gorsuch has voted with the other conservative justices on most of the court’s major cases, he has also sided with liberals on notable cases, including one in which he wrote the opinion in 2020 which expanded protections against discrimination in the workplace to LGBTQ people. Gorsuch has also sided with the liberal justices in every case the court has heard involving Native Americans since he joined the court.

Immigration, especially when those opposing deportation complained they were not given adequate notice of hearings, is another area where he typically breaks with his conservative colleagues.

Gorsuch recently returned from a summer teaching assignment in Porto, Portugal, for George Mason University’s law school. Last year, he spent two weeks in Lisbon, Portugal, on the same program, for which he was paid nearly $30,000, plus meals, 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.

The day he met AP, he said, was the first time he had put on a tie in weeks. He wore a navy suit, cowboy boots and a Western-style belt.

He seemed at ease, offering chocolate chip cookies and coffee to visitors and joking with a reporter who mentioned an upcoming trip to the New Jersey shore. “Go fly some flags over there,” Gorsuch said, referring to the controversy over flags, similar to the one raised by the Jan. 6 rioters, that were flown on homes owned by Justice Samuel Alito and his wife.

Gorsuch isn’t the only justice releasing a book this summer. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s memoir, “Lovely One,” will be published next month.