We’ve been impressed by Coloradan Neil Gorsuch since his appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2017, and it’s not just because he’s a native son. It’s also because the brilliant jurist, who holds degrees from Columbia, Harvard and Oxford, infused the nation’s highest court with a fresh dose of common sense.

It’s evident in his court opinions as well as in his published work outside the courtroom. That includes his latest book — he has written two others — that goes on sale this week and was previewed in an enlightening interview with the justice last Friday in the Wall Street Journal.

As its punny title suggests, “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law,” co-written with Gorsuch’s former clerk, Janie Nitze, examines a smorgasbord of government overregulation that is, at turns, maddening and amusing. The Journal’s interview opens with Gorsuch recounting one of his book’s anecdotes involving a run-of-the-mill magician for hire whose use of the old rabbit-in-the-hat trick ran afoul of federal law. The tale kind of says it all:

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“It’s 2005, and (the magician) is doing a show at a library. ‘Somebody in the audience comes up to him,’ as Justice Gorsuch tells it, ‘and says, “Do you have a license for that?” He says “I need a license for the rabbit?” “I’m from the USDA. You betcha you need a license.” ’ ”

As it turned out, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has regulatory authority over zoos and other animal exhibitors, and the department, in turn, had generated its own additional regulations that even covered backyard birthday parties. The magician thus had to endure home inspections and draft a disaster-response plan.

Oddly enough, the rules applied to rabbits in hats but not to those raised for meat.

“You’re telling me I can kill the rabbit right in front of you,” the magician at one point asked a government inspector, “but I can’t take it across the street to the birthday party?”

As the Journal observes, it’s punchline worthy even as it also is a sobering statement about gratuitous government overreach.

What’s more, the point of Gorsuch and Nitze’s book arguably is not so much about left vs. right as it is about the bureaucracy vs. common sense. As if to say the government is regulating for regulation’s sake. Which plausibly can and does happen no matter which party is in charge.

The book, for example, points to estimates that there are some 60,000 pages of U.S. statute and 188,000 pages of federal regulations. Those rules impose around 300,000 criminal sanctions — and require 9.8 billion man-hours of paperwork each year that must be filled out by ordinary Americans.

Gorsuch clearly finds that daunting, as we all should — no matter what our political views.

In other words, what appears to be a driving force in Gorsuch’s legal reasoning — that bureaucratic rule making has morphed into a perpetual-motion machine — has less to do with our nation’s fever-pitch political debate than with the need to restore clear thinking and sensible priorities to policy making.

That’s worth noting when recalling the political standoff that inevitably accompanied Gorsuch’s appointment under the Trump administration — and that unfortunately has become a ritual of just about every Supreme Court appointment. Gorsuch, caught in the crossfire, was miscast as a partisan foot soldier; he is in fact a profoundly independent legal mind and an advocate of reason.

“Too little law poses problems,” Gorsuch tells the Journal. “Law is essential…Too much law actually winds up making people fear law rather than respect law, fear their institutions rather than love their institutions.”

Who could reasonably disagree?

Colorado Springs Gazette Editorial Board