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

First, a little history. Last year, the Biden administration Announced It would end his 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 ban the entry into the United States to reduce the spread of infectious diseases. diseases. Title 42, as the policy became known, was supposedly established to protect the public. But when it went into effect, Covid-19 was already widespread and there was no evidence of significant transmission by asylum seekers and other migrants. The truth is that President Donald Trump had spent much of his time in office 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 kill Title 42, a Federal District Court in Washington ruled that the policy was illegal and ordered the government to end it. Then a group of states with Republican attorneys general sued to uphold the policy and appealed their case to the Supreme Court. The dispute came to an end last week, when the Supreme Court forwarded the case to a lower court with instructions to dismiss the motion as moot. The reason, presumably, is that the federal government had I’m done the public health emergency of Covid-19. There was nothing to decide.

However, there was something interesting about the court order in this case. Not content to let the trial stand on its own, Judge Neil Gorsuch added a statement. He recounted the history of the Title 42 policy not to criticize the court’s decision but to emphasize what, in his opinion, was the defining aspect of the Covid-19 crisis.

“The story of this case,” Gorsuch wrote, “illustrates the disruption we have experienced over the last three years in the way our laws are made and our liberties are respected.” It is at this point that Gorsuch blurted out: “Since March 2020, we may have experienced the largest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.”

Gorsuch made the point: “Executive officers across the country issued emergency decrees on an impressive scale” and “governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to stay in their homes.” They closed businesses and schools, he continued, and “threatened violators not only with civil penalties but also with criminal penalties.”

Now obviously there was, and still is, a debate about the scope of state, local and federal responses to covid-19, which killed more than 1.1 million people in the United States from March 2020 to May 2023 and remains among the leading causes of death. But do these measures have the possibility of being the “greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country”?

Consider the competition. Were the Covid restrictions a greater intrusion on civil liberties than the forced sterilization of more than 70,000 Americans under the eugenic policies of state and local governments across the country from the 1920s to the 1970s? The mass surveillance of thousands of Americans involved in liberal and leftist policies by the federal government during the 1960s? The McCarthyite purges of thousands of Americans accused of anti-American activities in the 1950s? The Palmer raids of 1919 and 1920, in which federal agents rounded up thousands of Americans on flimsy evidence, with plans to deport them from the country?

That’s just the 20th century. When we look back to the 19th century, we see even more egregious attacks on the peacetime rights and liberties of Americans. Beginning in the 1890s, for example, southern legislatures began to strip large sections of their states’ population of voting and civil rights. Then there is the labor dispute. In 1877 alone, state, local, and federal strikebreakers killed more than 100 people participating in anti-railroad strikes and protests across the country.

Of course, any catalog of 19th-century attacks on civil liberties would be incomplete without a mention of slavery, in which millions of Americans were reduced to personal property by force of law for the better part of a century under the Constitution. . And to protect and preserve the social order produced by the mass enslavement of millions of people, slave states enacted draconian limits on speech, from banning the circulation of anti-slavery materials to banning abolitionist speech altogether.

Indeed, it is possible that even in light of the full weight of American history, the covid restrictions on in-person gatherings have been a rare and egregious attack on civil liberties. But I am skeptical.

It is, however, interesting to think about what he says about Gorsuch that such restraints hold such an important place in his historical imagination. Perhaps they conflict with his occasional libertarian streak. Perhaps it is, like his colleague Samuel Alito, deeply offended by rules that put limits at religious services, but allowed people to shop at grocery stores. Or maybe he just didn’t think of those other historical examples at all.

In which case, Gorsuch’s denunciation of the pandemic restrictions acts as an unintended glimpse into his vision of the United States. With one notable exception (and it is quite notable) – the history of Native Americans, is willing to ignore or not even see our long history of repression and internal tyranny in peacetime. Instead, what you seem to see is a long history of freedom with some notable exceptions, including our recent experience with the pandemic.

It’s a shocking worldview but not, in the end, surprising. A judge like Gorsuch, who often struggles to see injustice and cruelty in the present, from their votes in favor of capital punishment to your vote to let the states curb women’s bodily autonomy – will surely struggle to see injustice and cruelty in the past.