For many years, proponents of federalism, limited government, and secession have highlighted the onerous burden posed by the immense Federal bureaucracy. There are too many laws, to the point where everyone, even former presidents, is a criminal of some kind. This week, we found an unexpected ally in the fight against federal over-regulation: Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. 

In an article in The Atlantic, Gorsuch makes the case that the biggest legal problem facing the United States isn’t an ineffective Congress or an overreaching executive but that there are too many laws in the first place. The current Code of Federal Regulations is over 20 volumes, approximately 188,000 pages.  By contrast, the first “Federal Register” was in 1936 and was 16 pages long.  And it’s not just the administrative bureaucracy that’s the problem.

Gorsuch explained, “Nowadays, it’s not unusual for new laws to span hundreds of pages. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 ran over 600 pages, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 almost 1,000 pages, and the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021—which included a COVID-19 relief package—more than 5,000 pages. About the last one, the chair of the House Rules Committee quipped that “if we provide[d] everyone a paper copy, we would have to destroy an entire forest.” Buried in the bill were provisions for horse racing, approvals for two new Smithsonian museums, and a section on foreign policy regarding Tibet. By comparison, the landmark protections afforded by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 took just 28 pages to describe.”

Take a step back and think about that for just one minute.  We have a Supreme Court Justice whose grievance is the same as one of the points often made by the Texas Nationalist Movement: there’s just too much Federal red tape.  Gorsuch hasn’t gone so far as to say that Texas would be better off without that burden, but the TNM says it often. 

Gorsuch continues, “Whatever the combination of causes, one thing seems clear: If in this country law has always been king, its empire has never been so expansive. More than ever, we turn to the law to address any problem we perceive. More than ever, we are inclined to use national authorities to dictate a single answer for the whole country. More than ever, we are willing to criminalize conduct with which we disagree. And more than ever, if elected officials seem slow to act, we look to other sources of authority to fill the void.”

Gorsuch ends the article nicely, challenging us all to “consider how well we are doing as a nation in our aspiration to live under the rule of law where ordinary people have room to grow, plan, and make their own way.”

Missing is any hint of a solution from Gorsuch.  He says there are too many laws, that they are too complicated, too arbitrarily enforced, and that they interfere with the lives of ordinary citizens.  What he’s missing is a plan to deal with that. 

The most obvious solution to this problem is to simply start over.  Go back to zero and rebuild.  Start over with a new constitution and a new nation: the nation of Texas.  A free and independent republic of Texas will immediately consider “what can be, unburdened by what has been.”  Sure, Kamala Harris who’s fond of that phrase, is herself a symptom of the ever-reaching creep of the Federal government, a person whose values are contrary to many Texans’ values, but that doesn’t make the statement any less aspirational or true.  

Only in a free Texas, unburdened by the Federal overreach that’s so bad even a Supreme Court justice sees the problem, only then can we build a country that is once again truly free.