Page 12 - IAV Digital Magazine #601

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Neil Gorsuch Complains There Are Too Many Laws in America
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajoCmRvkOf8
Americans, decent, hard-working people who are trying to do their best, are just getting whacked by the laws," he said.
Gorsuch said nobody really knows how many laws there are but
that Congress has been busy passing laws that most people know little about.
He said there are at least 5,000 federal crimes and another 300,000 regulations that can be used for prosecutions.
As a result, most Americans have probably committed a crime that could have them imprisoned, he said.
He also noted that 1 in 47 Americans are currently in jail, on parole or in some other form of correc- tional supervision.
Gorsuch told the audience about Marty Hahne, a children's entertainer from Missouri. After one of Hahne's magic shows, Department of Agriculture officials turned up, showed a badge and asked if he had a license for a rabbit used during his performance.
Hahne then had to apply for an "animal
exhibitor" license for his rabbit and was also told he also needed an emer- gency preparedness plan for the animal.
He then had to hire a consultant to write a 28-page plan to cover everything from chemical spills to hur- ricanes and a depart- ment official then came to his home to inspect it.
Gorsuch said that a surplus of laws and regulations has led to a huge expansion in the number of attor- neys and said he believes there are too many lawyers in the U.S.
He said that he couldn't have afford- ed to hire himself as a lawyer.
"A run-of-the-mill con- tract dispute could cost $60,000. That's the salary of an aver- age American," he said. "I couldn't have afforded my own services as a lawyer."
He also told the story of John Yates, a Florida fisherman. Yates had been out at sea for several days when a govern- ment inspector pulled up alongside him and said he had to make sure every fish he had caught was longer than the legal
minimum of 20 inch- es.
The inspector poured out all the fish from the boat's hold and found that 72 were a bit shorter than the legal requirement. However, they had measured the fish only to their nose and not to the end of the their jaw, which is required by law.
Inspectors did a sec- ond inspection when Yates got back to port, this time finding only 69 fish were too small—a deficit of three fish.
Yates was cited and thought that was the end of the matter but three years later armed federal agents came to his house and he was arrested for violating the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, passed after account- ants had shredded evidence in the Enron scandal.
Yates was accused of destroying evidence by throwing the three fish overboard and he was convicted and sentenced to 30 days in jail.
He took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court and won, but by then he had lost his fishing business, Gorsuch said.
There
are far too many laws in the U.S. and thou- sands more are added every
year, Supreme
Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has said.
Gorsuch told an audi- ence at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum in Simi Valley, California, on Thursday that nobody knows how many laws there are and people who have tried to count them have been left dumb- founded.
Examples of ridicu- lous use of the law and government overreach that Gorsuch cited include a magician ques- tioned by agriculture officials for having a rabbit in his show and
a
fisherman arrested after getting rid of some undersized fish under a federal law originally aimed at the accounting industry.
He was talking about his new book Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law that he co-wrote with legal scholar Janie Nitze.
Gorsuch,
whom Donald
Trump nominated to the Supreme Court in 2017, said he wanted to address laws that affect ordinary Americans in their everyday lives.
"I've been a judge for coming up on 20 years, and I've just seen so many cases come into my court- room where ordinary
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