Chapter 2 - The Modern Threats
As Justice Gorsuch warns, ordinary Americans are trapped in a maze of laws “in ways they couldn’t reasonably have expected.”
Justice Gorsuch warns that when law becomes too vast, it corrodes respect for law itself. Citizens lose confidence that the system is fair. And when citizens no longer believe the law is just, the Republic falters.
As he put it:
“The genius of a free people is to leave space for individuals to author their own lives, free from the boot of government on their neck.”
Madison’s warning and Gorsuch’s testimony converge: liberty requires not just limits on ideology, but limits on law itself. To defend freedom, we must cut away the tangle of rules that ensnare ordinary Americans and restore a government that protects rights without crushing initiative or conscience.
Having traced the threats to liberty — religious dominionism, socialism, ideological orthodoxy in classrooms, Islamism, and bureaucratic overreach — we now turn to the legal foundation. In Chapter 3, we will lay out the constitutional structure, case law, and judicial reasoning that provide the tools to resist these threats and restore true American liberty.
[For a fuller discussion of these themes, see Justice Neil Gorsuch’s conversation at the Bush Center on liberty, the rule of law, and leaving citizens room to “author their own lives without the boot of government on their neck.” Watch the event here.]