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ARIZONA v. MAYORKAS 

Statement of GORSUCH, J. 

threatened  to  fire  noncompliant  employees,21  and  warned 
that service members who refused to vaccinate might face 
dishonorable discharge and confinement.22  Along the way, 
it seems federal officials may have pressured social-media
companies to suppress information about pandemic policies 
with which they disagreed.23 

While  executive  officials  issued  new  emergency  decrees 
at a furious pace, state legislatures and Congress—the bod-
ies  normally  responsible  for  adopting  our  laws—too  often 
fell silent.  Courts bound to protect our liberties addressed 
a  few—but  hardly  all—of  the  intrusions  upon  them.  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.

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 some-
thing 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 will-
ingly 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 

—————— 

21 See,  e.g.,  K.  Liptak  &  K.  Collins,  Biden  Announces  New  Vaccine 
Mandates that Could Cover 100 Million Americans, CNN (Sept. 9, 2021),
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/09/politics/joe-biden-covid-speech/index.html. 
22 Austin v. U. S. Navy Seals 1–26, 595 U. S. ___, ___ (2022) (ALITO, J., 

dissenting) (slip op., at 1). 

23 See, e.g., S. Myers, Free Speech vs. Disinformation Comes to a Head, 
N. Y.  Times  (Feb.  9,  2023),  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/business/
free-speech-social-media-lawsuit.html.