Our city and county are not immune to government overreach. Until the COVID mandates were ended, our freedoms were dictated by an unelected health czar appointed by the County of Ventura for three straight years. We all remember how the County used health officials to close up businesses and watch over countless details of what was once called “free enterprise.” Masks were forced on shoppers at pain of being removed from stores. Distance requirements were drawn on our sidewalks and floors, and at one point, a leading health official here even talked about removing family members from their homes if too many were sharing a bathroom!
If anyone is fearful that government overreach may come back upon our cities and families, I have good news: the United States Supreme Court is concerned, too. A per curium decision (all justices in agreement) forced the Biden Administration to drop the mandate in May, less than a month ago. There needed to be an end to what was not an emergency. Justices Neil Gorsuch and a majority of the Supreme Court agreed that government overreach was becoming dangerous to our freedoms.
“Fear is why people succumb to control by the government — including control from our own unelected County health officials. Fear split up families and friends and is still causing medical confusion in our hospitals.”
Take a look at this paragraph from Justice Gorsuch’s scathing opinion against government overreach (see in Arizona v. Alejandro Mayorkas, Secy of Homeland Security) in which there was only one dissent, by Justice Jackson, on a procedural point. Justice Gorsuch wrote:
”Doubtless, many lessons can be learned from this chapter in our history, and hopefully serious efforts will be made to study it. 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 everything, if only we do exactly as he says, can prove an irresistible force. We do not need to confront a bayonet, we need only a nudge, before we willingly abandon the nicety of requiring laws to be adopted by our legislative representatives and accept rule by decree. Along the way, we will accede to the loss of many cherished civil liberties—the right to worship freely, to debate public policy without censorship, to gather with friends and family, or simply to leave our homes. We may even cheer on those who ask us to disregard our normal lawmaking processes and forfeit our personal freedoms. Of course, this is no new story. Even the ancients warned that democracies can degenerate toward autocracy in the face of fear.”
That stands as a monumental statement against government overreach and should hearten all businesses and citizens who suffered under the lockdowns. I think particularly of our rest homes, churches, hospitals and, really, every private and public facility, home or venue in the Thousand Oaks community. Gorsuch correctly identifies the culprit as fear. Fear is why people succumb to control by the government — including control from our own unelected County health officials. Fear split up families and friends and is still causing medical confusion in our hospitals.
Note how Justice Gorsuch warns of a “leader or an expert who claims he can fix everything if only we do exactly as he says.” Those are words we should heed with great sobriety.
The good news is there are more than 6,000 cases in litigation that address basic American freedoms, according to Alliance Defending Freedom. Driven by fear, our unelected and elected leaders shut down our whole town and region. Now that it’s over, we should celebrate our freedoms because our nation is still a beacon to the rest of the world. Many people still suffer under the kind of tyranny from which we have just been delivered. We can be thankful that Justice Gorsuch and the Court stood tall to remind us of what the cost of tyranny looks like. In that same spirit, we can agree with them and say, “In our cities and our county — never again!”
Retired attorney George Nicoletti was admitted to the California State Bar and Federal Bar for the Central District of California in 1969. He served as Constitutional Law Professor at Glendale College of Law for 6 years and practiced law in Thousand Oaks starting in 1972. He was admitted to the U.S. District Court in Tucson, Arizona, in 1994.
