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Justice Alito's Crusade Against a Secular America Isn't Over
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/05/justice-alitos-crusade-against-a-secular-america-isnt-overNo paywall
https://archive.ph/nx2kf
Some baby boomers were permanently shaped by their participation in the countercultural protests and the antiwar activism of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Others were shaped by their aversion to those movements. Justice Samuel Alito belongs to the latter category. For many years, he lacked the power to do much about that profound distaste, and in any case he had a reputation for keeping his head down. When President George W. Bush nominated Alito to the Supreme Court, in 2005, many journalists portrayed him as a conservative but not an ideologue. The Times noted that legal scholars characterized his jurisprudence as “cautious” and “respectful of precedent.” Self-described liberals who’d known him—as an undergraduate at Princeton, as a law student at Yale, or in some later professional capacity—sketched portraits of a quiet, methodical, reasonable man.
On the Court, even as Alito’s opinions aligned consistently with the goals of the Republican Party—in particular, of social conservatives—admirers praised him as pragmatic and Burkean. According to a 2018 C-span/P.S.B. poll, he was the conservative Justice the fewest Americans could name, and for years he was overshadowed by his more flamboyant late colleague, Antonin Scalia; by Clarence Thomas, whose notorious confirmation hearings were followed by a rivetingly long silence on the bench; even by Neil Gorsuch, with his cussed libertarian streak. Richard Lazarus, a professor at Harvard Law School who has studied the Court, told me that in Alito’s first years as a Justice he was known primarily as Chief Justice John Roberts’s right-hand man—“someone the Chief could assign to write an opinion” that would not be too flashy or provocative, and that “would keep five votes together when he couldn’t trust Scalia to do it, because Scalia would swing for the fences and risk losing votes.”
Now, though, Alito is the embodiment of a conservative majority that is ambitious and extreme. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.) With the recent additions of Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to the Court, the conservative bloc no longer needs Roberts to get results. And Alito has taken a zealous lead in reversing the progressive gains of the sixties and early seventies—from overturning Roe v. Wade to stripping away voting rights. At a Yale Law School forum in 2014, he was asked to name a personality trait that had impeded his career. Alito responded that he’d held his tongue too often—that it “probably would have been better if I said a bit more, at various times.” He’s holding his tongue no longer. Indeed, Alito now seems to be saying whatever he wants in public, often with a snide pugnaciousness that suggests his past decorum was suppressing considerable resentment.
Last term, Alito landed the reputation-defining assignment of writing the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which eliminated the constitutional right to abortion enshrined by Roe nearly fifty years ago. In May, a draft of his opinion was leaked, and from start to finish it sounded cantankerous and dismissive. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito declared. “Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences.” He likened Roe to Plessy v. Ferguson, the notorious decision upholding segregation; approvingly cited centuries-old common law categorizing a woman who received an abortion after “quickening” as a “murderess”; and used the inflammatory word “personhood” when describing “fetal life.”
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This article doesn't say outright that Alito's racist or misogynistic, just cites a few behaviors that suggest the Klan's side is represented:
As the years have gone on, it’s become increasingly common to see Alito fret over the burdens of certain classes of people while downplaying those of others." ...
In a 2011 article in the Times Magazine, Emily Bazelon noted that Alito’s opinions occasionally display some empathy, but that it “rarely extends to people who are not like him.” This selective quality, she argued, offers an insight into “conservative instincts” about “who deserves our solicitude.” ...
While at the Solicitor General’s office, Alito wrote a memo defending police officers’ right to shoot fleeing suspects regardless of the threat they posed. The case involved a fifteen-year-old Black boy, Edward Garner, who, according to Alito’s memo, was killed by a Memphis police officer who “could see that his target” did “not appear to be armed.”
And here's one of Alito's breathtakingly and cruelly dishonest, tRumpist-level descriptions of affirmative action: 'Alito, Fried recalled, came up with some choice lines, such as “Henry Aaron would not be regarded as the all-time home run king, and he would not be a model for youth, if the fences had been moved in whenever he came to the plate.”'
In a 2011 article in the Times Magazine, Emily Bazelon noted that Alito’s opinions occasionally display some empathy, but that it “rarely extends to people who are not like him.” This selective quality, she argued, offers an insight into “conservative instincts” about “who deserves our solicitude.” ...
While at the Solicitor General’s office, Alito wrote a memo defending police officers’ right to shoot fleeing suspects regardless of the threat they posed. The case involved a fifteen-year-old Black boy, Edward Garner, who, according to Alito’s memo, was killed by a Memphis police officer who “could see that his target” did “not appear to be armed.”
Alito: Any rule permitting the use of deadly force to stop a fleeing suspect must rest on the general principle that the state is justified in using whatever force is necessary to enforce its laws. Assuming that a fleeing felony suspect is entirely rational . . . what he is saying in effect is: “Kill me or allow me to escape, at least for now.” If every suspect could evade arrest by putting the state to this choice, societal order would quickly break down.
And here's one of Alito's breathtakingly and cruelly dishonest, tRumpist-level descriptions of affirmative action: 'Alito, Fried recalled, came up with some choice lines, such as “Henry Aaron would not be regarded as the all-time home run king, and he would not be a model for youth, if the fences had been moved in whenever he came to the plate.”'
I've been enjoying our DIL's special margaritas while we watch the children down in the river. Nice gathering, no close trumpist relatives. Happy Labor Day.
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