Neil Gorsuch Criticized Over Statement on Civil Liberties

Conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has blasted the use of emergency powers during the pandemic, saying that COVID-19 restrictions were the greatest infringement on civil liberties in American history. His comment was criticized on social media, with many saying pandemic-era measures cannot compare with slavery.

Gorsuch, a Donald Trump nominee, made the scathing comment in the Supreme Court's final word on the effort by a group of states to challenge the end of Title 42. The measure allowed authorities to immediately expel most asylum seekers reaching U.S. land borders on public-health grounds.

Title 42 remained in place as other pandemic health measures ended—but it was lifted when President Joe Biden announced the COVID-19 national emergency was over in April. The measure came to an end on May 11.

The Supreme Court removed the case from its calendar on Thursday, after conservative justices had blocked the Biden administration from lifting Title 42 last December.

Gorsuch, who dissented in December, said that though he does not discount the concerns of border states over the lifting of Title 42, "the current border crisis is not a COVID crisis."

Gorsuch claimed that COVID-19-related emergency powers have been misused. "Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country," he wrote in the statement.

"Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes. They shuttered businesses and schools, public and private.

"They closed churches, even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on. They threatened violators not just with civil penalties but with criminal sanctions too," the statement continued.

He said that the judiciary had allowed itself "to be part of the problem by permitting litigants to manipulate our docket to perpetuate a decree designed for one emergency to address another."

The conservative justice was heavily criticized online for calling COVID-19 restrictions the most egregious infringement of civil liberties in America's peacetime history.

"Neil Gorsuch claims that Covid public-health measures may have been the greatest peacetime intrusions on civil liberties in American history," Vox reporter Ian Millhiser tweeted. "Could someone please give this profoundly ignorant man one (1) book on slavery or Jim Crow?"

"Justice Gorsuch calls Covid safety measures 'the greatest peacetime intrusions on civil liberties in American history.' White wealth privilege is ignoring 400 years of Native genocide, 265 years of Black slavery, & 99 years of Jim Crow—but lamenting 1 year of PTO during COVID," tweeted human rights lawyer and author Qasim Rashid.

Jim Crow laws enforced racial segregations in the Southern states between 1877 and the beginning of the civil rights movement in the 1950s.

"The guy who helped strip away the rights of women to determine what they do with their own body and declare that privacy isn't a constitutional right wants to say asking people to wear a mask in a pandemic is a great violation of civil rights," wrote another Twitter user.

Gorsuch also received some support on social media, with people praising his "powerful words."

"Gorsuch is correct on this [sic] opinion. They overstepped their bounds," wrote a Twitter user. Physician Kat Lindley tweeted that the "incredible statement" by Gorsuch was something "any freedom-loving American" should read.

Newsweek has contacted the Supreme Court for comment by email.