Opinion | Neil Gorsuch Has Given Himself Away - The New York Times

In case you think that Neil Gorsuch - whose occasional apparent deviations are  attention getting - is some sort of democrat you should think again.  This is the Judge who complained bitterly at the chains of  notions such as deference to Federal agencies is owed by a judge. In the Kisor case he denounced such ideas as having created "a systematic bias in favor of the federal government, the most powerful of parties, and against everyone else.” In fact, he said,   “overruling [the Auer deference doctrine] ” would take us “directly back to Skidmore [v. Swift & Co. 1944], liberating courts to decide cases based on their independent judgment and `follow [the] agency’s [view] only to the extent it is persuasive.”

As Christopher J. White has explained Justice Kagan's opinion for the Court narrows the principle - first articulated by Antonin Scalia - that if an agency regulation is ambiguous regulation the national courts should defer to the agency's effort to understand its meaning.

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Gorsuch has now outdone himself with a vociferousn denunciation of the policies pursued by the Centers for Disease Control to k

Jamelle Bouie | Neil Gorsuch Has Given Himself Away - The New York Times

By Jamelle Bouie

The justices of the Supreme Court aren’t always open about their views, but there are times when they inadvertently reveal just how skewed their perspectives are.

First, a little background. Last year the Biden administration announced it would end its predecessor’s pandemic-era policy of expelling asylum seekers at the Mexican and Canadian borders based on a federal law that gives the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the power to bar entry into the United States in order to curtail the spread of infectious diseases. Title 42, as the policy came to be known, was supposedly established to protect the public. But by the time it came into effect, Covid-19 was already widespread, and there was no evidence of significant transmission by asylum seekers and other migrants. What was true is that President Donald Trump had devoted much of his time in office to dismantling the nation’s immigration system and limiting entry as much as possible from the southern border.

Several months after the administration announced its plan to end Title 42, a Federal District Court in Washington ruled that the policy was illegal and ordered the government to end it. A group of states with Republican attorneys general then sued to keep the policy in place, appealing their case to the Supreme Court. The dispute came to an end last week, when the Supreme Court remanded the case to a lower court with instructions to dismiss the motion as moot. The reason, presumably, is that the federal government had already ended the Covid-19 public health emergency. There was nothing to decide.

There was, however, something interesting about the court’s order in this case. Not content to let the instruction stand on its own, Justice Neil Gorsuch added a statement. He recounted the story of the Title 42 policy not to criticize the court’s decision but to emphasize what, in his view, was the defining aspect of the Covid-19 crisis.