Samuel Alito

2007 official portrait.

It's the Law

To punish and protect

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Samuel Alito (1950–) is an American conservative Supreme Court Justice appointed by former President George W. Bush to replace Sandra Day O'Connor after she retired in 2005. His appointment pushed the Court well to the right. His nomination was quite controversial, and many liberals believed he would not be an impartial Justice; they were right.

His wife seemed to be crying during his confirmation while he was being questioned by Democratic Senators; a cheap way to try to milk sympathy for him. He is one of six Roman Catholics on the Supreme Court as of September 2012, and the second Italian American on the Court. His father was an Italian immigrant.

As of 2022 Alito is considered to be part of the most conservative faction of court along with Clarence Thomas, even going so far as to sign on to Thomas' dissent that supported the anti-vaxxer movement.^[2]

Corruption and ethics violations[edit]

On June 20 2023, the same organization (ProPublica) that published a detailed exposé on Thomas' friendship with a Republican billionaire (complete with many undisclosed "gifts" and largesse), published a detailed exposé on Alito receiving a "gift" from a Republican billionaire. In this case, in 2008, Paul Singer, who is the longtime manager and founder of a vulture fund called Elliott Associates as well as a longtime chairman of the board of trustees of the Manhattan Institute,^[4][5][6] flew Alito up to Alaska on a private jet to enjoy fishing at a remote luxury fishing lodge that cost more than $1,000 a day. ProPublica estimated that the entire trip could have cost over $100,000. Like Thomas, Alito did not report the 2008 fishing trip on his annual financial disclosures. The trip was organized by Leonard Leo, the longtime leader of the Federalist Society. Not coincidentally, in 2014, Alito voted with the 7-1 majority in favor of Singer when a dispute came up in the Supreme Court between Singer's hedge fund and the nation of Argentina. (Alito did not recuse himself from the case, as one would ethically expect.)^[7]

Coup supporter[edit]

“”He is putting the vex in vexillology, but not the lol.

—Alexandra Petri[8]

In May 2024, The New York Times reported that in January 2021 — around the same time that the Supreme Court was considering a case concerning the 2020 U.S. presidential election — Alito flew the American flag upside down outside his house for several days.^[9] Alito gave the feeble excuse of blaming his wife for the upside-down flag — doesn't he live there too? At the time, supporters of the 2021 U.S. coup attempt frequently inverted the flag to show their support for Donald Trump's Big Lie. According to judicial experts, the flag inversion was a clear violation of ethics rules, and the event raised doubts about Alito's impartiality in cases related to both the 2024 U.S. presidential election and the coup attempt.^[10] Alito along with Clarence Thomas (husband of a coup plotter) was notably among the minority view in the court that it should hear a GOP election denialist lawsuit that preceded the coup.^[10][11]

Alito's explanation for the flag flying was so arrogant and disbelievable that it caused New York University law professor Melissa Murray to say that Alito was trolling.^[12][13] In support of that, the various explanations that Alito has given have been contradicted by facts.^[14]

Dominionism supporter[edit]

A few days later, the New York Times reported that between July and September of 2023, Alito flew the Pine Tree Flag a.k.a. the "Appeal to Heaven" flag outside of his beach house. This once obscure flag was popularized by Dutch Sheets, a prominent figure within the New Apostolic Reformation movement, as a symbol of this movement's ambitions to take over the country's government and remake it into a "Christian" theocracy. This flag was subsequently also flown at the 2021 U.S. coup attempt, as well as hung within the office of the Dominionist House of Representatives speaker Mike Johnson. This revelation further troubled ethics experts, as it was yet another instance of Alito outright publicly supporting coup attempt related symbols away from the courtroom. Such raised even more questions on his impartiality on judging coup-related and Big Lie-related cases.^[15]

Alito has long had the opinion that religion is "under attack" in the United States; many of his decisions have thus used this framework in order to erode the separation of church and state, First Amendment be damned.^[16] To underscore how far this concept reaches, in a case relating to Kim Davis in October 2020, Alito (along with Clarence Thomas, who wrote the opinion) questioned the right of gay marriage with the bizarre opinion that those whom labeled religious-traditionalist homophobes as bigots somehow violated "religious liberty".^[17]

Misogyny[edit]

While many Republicans wish for the good old days of 1950, or sometimes even 1850, Alito's leaked draft ruling^[18] on overturning Roe v. Wade in May 2022 showed that he yearns for the days of 1650, or perhaps 1250. In his leaked draft, Alito refers to English judge Matthew Hale (1609–1676) as a "great" and "eminent" common law legal authority;^{[18]:16,26[19]} Hale is cited nine times in the draft.^{[18]:16-19,26,44} Hale sentenced two 'witches' to death.^[19] Hale was largely responsible for the longstanding legal distrust of women's accusations of rape, as well as the marital rape exemption from prosecution.^[19] Two problems in Alito's use of Hale in the draft are:^[19]

1. America did not regulate abortion with regard to 'quickening' (first movement of the fetus) for many decades, contrary to Hale's cited posthumous book Intimate Lies and the Law.
2. Alito relies on sources, including Hale, that support male supremacy, where females are treated as property.

Alito also cites judge Henry de Bracton (c. 1210–1288) six times with his book De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae.^{[18]:16,17,25,26,44} Bracton describes the 'proper' procedure for determining whether a woman is pregnant: "carefully examine her by feeling her breasts and abdomen and in every way", and if the exam was inconclusive she would be locked in a castle at her own expense and examined every day until conclusion.^[20] Bracton also states that in cases of suspected fraud, "the woman cannot exceed the gestation period by a single day, even where the issue dies in utero or turns into a monster."^[20] Although democracies did not exist at the time of Bracton, he did emphasize the point that England was a theocracy in his book by stating that the king was the "vicar of God" with no equal.^[20]

Stopped clock[edit]

Despite deserving a lot of criticism, there are also some occasions in which Alito should be praised. For example, he was the sole member of the Supreme Court to dissent in Snyder v. Phelps, where he ruled that the Westboro Baptist Church had entrapped the participants of a funeral despite their speech, in its self, not being unconstitutional. This opinion earned the praise of John Paul Stevens, who had then only recently retired from the Supreme Court. He was also the sole dissenter in United States v. Stevens, ruling that the state has an obligation to protect animals, like children, since they are vulnerable and, therefore, images of animal abuse (the law in question was intended to ban crush films, and Congress was later able to get a variant that passed constitutional muster through) do not constitute speech.

References[edit]