Justice Samuel Alito would like everyone to know that in the wake of the Supreme Court revoking 50 years of abortion rights and then being plagued by corruption scandal after corruption scandal, our criticism of him and his institution is very much hurting his feelings.
Alito told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published Friday that attacks on the “legitimacy” of the high court are “new during [his] lifetime.”
“We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances. And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us,” he said. “The idea has always been that judges are not supposed to respond to criticisms, but if the courts are being unfairly attacked, the organized bar will come to their defense.” But “if anything,” the justice continued, “they’ve participated to some degree in these attacks.”
Let’s briefly roll through some of the Supreme Court ethics scandals that have surfaced just in the past two weeks: Clarence Thomas, whose wife Ginni tried to overturn a presidential election, is being financed by a billionaire GOP megadonor who literally collects Hitler memorabilia and has a garden full of dictator statues (oh, and who doesn’t charge Thomas’ mother rent). Neil Gorsuch, who discloses gifts as small as cowboy boots and a fishing rod, did not disclose that he sold a 40-acre Colorado property he co-owned to the CEO of a law firm that often argues cases before the court. And Insider reported Friday that Chief Justice John Roberts’ wife, Jane, was paid 10.3 million in commissions from “elite law firms” that, of course, also had business before the court.
And as story after story come out about just how corrupt, unethical, and frankly, bought the people are who are deciding things like what we can do with our bodies and who gets voting rights in this country, Alito is complaining that they are the victims in all this, because someone leaked his draft opinion in Dobbs a month early and people protested.
“Those of us who were thought to be in the majority, thought to have approved my draft opinion, were really targets of assassination,” he told WSJ. “It was rational for people to believe that they might be able to stop the decision in Dobbs by killing one of us.”
Nevermind that Alito himself was reportedly the one who leaked the Hobby Lobby birth control decision to donors in 2014, before calling the Dobbs leak a “grave betrayal” and blaming it on some “angry left-wing law clerk.” The call, sir, appears to be coming from inside the house.
And now, amid all this, Alito and Republicans insist that it’s “the Left” that trying to “de-legitimize” the Supreme Court. This from Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) this week:
The National Review then published a defense of Clarence Thomas, titled “Justice Thomas Acted Properly and Was Not Required to Disclose His Trips,” that came with this hilarious note: “(Full disclosure: I worked on Justice Thomas’s confirmation as a lawyer in White House in 1991, have co-edited a book on him titled Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words, and remain close friends with him. I have also represented Ginni Thomas in the January 6 Committee inquiry.)“
In short, no one is “de-legitimizing” the Supreme Court more than themselves, at this point.