What Should Be Learned From Concentrating Powers in Government?

The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday concerns concentration of power in government. In writing the U.S. Constitution and organizing the government, the Framers did what they could to avoid the concentration of power in the federal government. However, more and more power has migrated to the executive branch over the years, the dangers of which were shown under “emergency powers” during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Michele Blood at The Blaze reported on an “unsigned order” with an attached statement about a case that became moot due to the expiration of Title 42 on May 11. As most Americans know, Title 42 was put into place by the Trump administration to aid in removing migrants from the United States due to the pandemic. In the words of Blood: 

Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch slammed the sweeping use of emergency powers during the pandemic as “breathtaking” in scale.

“Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country,” Trump appointee Justice Gorsuch wrote, in pertinent part….

The conservative justice spared neither presidents nor states nor lawmakers nor colleagues in his pointed remarks.

“The concentration of power in the hands of so few may be efficient and sometimes popular. But it does not tend toward sound government,” Gorsuch wrote.

“However wise one person or his advisors may be, that is no substitute for the wisdom of the whole of the American people that can be tapped in the legislative process.”

Gorsuch took aim at government-imposed vaccine mandates, lockdowns, church and school closures while other businesses like casinos remained open, the eviction moratorium, and federal officials’ apparent pressure on social media companies to tamp down speech expressing disagreement with government’s approaches to pandemic management.

He chastised Congress and state legislatures’ silence in the face of executive officials issuing orders that ought to have gone through the lawmaking process.

He blasted the judiciary in general, including the Supreme Court on which he is seated.

“In some cases, like this one, courts even allowed themselves to be used to perpetuate emergency public-health decrees for collateral purposes, itself a form of emergency-lawmaking-by-litigation.”

Gorsuch continued by saying that the nation should learn crucial lessons from this chapter in the history of our nation. One of those lessons “involves seizing upon the power of fear and the desire for safety to achieve ends contrary to our nation’s founding principles. Another, he said, involves concentrating power in the hands of too few.”