The times. (Gainesville, Ga.) 1972-current, May 21, 2023, Image 4

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The times., May 21, 2023, Image 4

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Newspaper Page Text4A Sunday, May 21,2023 The Times, Gainesville, Georgia | gainesvilletimes.com NATION Gorsuch: Emergency orders were intrusion on liberties J. SCOn APPLEWHITE I Associated Press Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch joins other members of the Supreme Court as they pose for a new group portrait, at the Supreme Court building in Washington, Friday, Oct. 7. BY MARK SHERMAN Associated Press WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court got rid of a pandemic-related immi gration case with a single sentence. Justice Neil Gorsuch had a lot more to say, level ing harsh criticism of how governments, from small towns to the nation’s capi tal, responded to the grav est public health threat in a century. The justice, a 55-year- old conservative who was President Donald Trump’s first Supreme Court nomi nee, called emergency measures taken during the COVID-19 crisis that killed more than 1 million Ameri cans perhaps “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.” He pointed to orders closing schools, restricting church services, mandat ing vaccines and prohibit ing evictions. His broadside was aimed at local, state and federal officials — even his colleagues. “Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale,” Gor such wrote in an eight-page statement Thursday that accompanied an expected Supreme Court order for mally dismissing a case involving the use of the Title 42 policy to prevent asylum seekers from enter ing the United States. The policy was ended last week with the expira tion of the public health emergency first declared more than three years ago because of the coronavirus pandemic. From the start of his Supreme Court tenure in 2017, Gorsuch, a Colorado native who loves to ski and bicycle, has been more willing than most justices to part company with his col leagues, both left and right. He has mainly voted with the other conservatives in his six years as a justice, joining the majority that overturned Roe v. Wade and expanded gun rights last year. But he has charted a different course on some issues, writing the court’s 2020 opinion that extended federal protections against workplace discrimination to LGBTQ people. He also has joined with the liberal justices in support of Native American rights. When the omicron vari ant surged in late 2021 and early 2022, Gorsuch was the lone justice to appear in the courtroom unmasked even as his seatmate, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who has diabetes, reportedly did not feel safe in close quarters with people who were not wearing masks. So Sotomayor, who con tinues to wear a mask in public, did not take the bench with the other jus tices in January 2022. The two justices denied reports they were at odds over the issue. The emergency orders about which Gorsuch complained were first announced in the early days of the pandemic, when Trump was president, and months before the virus was well understood and a vaccine was developed. The thrust of his com plaint is not new. He has written before in individ ual cases that came to the court during the pandemic, sometimes dissenting from orders that left emergency decrees in place. The justices intervened in several COVID-related cases. With Gorsuch and five other conservatives in the majority, they ended the eviction moratorium and blocked a Biden admin istration plan to require workers at larger compa nies to be vaccinated or wear a mask and submit to regular testing. Once Amy Coney Barrett joined the court, after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, they ended restrictions on religious ser vices in some areas. By a 5-4 vote from which Gorsuch and three conser vative colleagues dissented, the court allowed the administration to require many health care workers to be vaccinated. But on Thursday, Gor such gathered his com plaints in one place, writing about lessons he hoped might be learned from the past three years. “One lesson might be this: Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces. They can lead to a clamor for action —almost any action — as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat. A leader or an expert who claims he can fix every thing, if only we do exactly as he says, can prove an irresistible force,” he wrote. Another possible lesson, he wrote: “The concentra tion of power in the hands of so few may be efficient and sometimes popular. 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