Alito and his Oligarchical Ethics

I need to return briefly to a theme touched on the post immediately preceding this one. The profound dishonesty of the entire conservative movement is embodied by Justice Samuel Alito and encapsulated by something that happened just last year.

For years, it has been conservative dogma – wholly false – that the Supreme Court should be made up of jurists who “call balls and strikes” and do not allow their policy preferences or ideological beliefs to color how they rule on matters of great import for the citizens of this country. That the court should not “legislate from the bench” and merely interpret the Constitution as its drafters intended.

We can call bullshit on this sort of rhetoric by looking at the Court’s conscience-shocking reversal of the Roe v. Wade decision. It is not “conservative” to ignore stare decisis or to literally use the power of the court to strip women in this country of what had been between 1973 – 2022 a Constitutional right to personal privacy.

The author of the majority’s decision was Samuel Alito, who is also the most likely suspect with respect to the early leaking of that shameful screed, unique in that it shrunk rights for women in this country, rather than expanding them. Alito’s decision was released on June 24, 2022.

Literally a month or so later, Alito gave a speech in Rome, Italy wherein he mocked foreign criticism of the Dobbs decision. That speech was given at an event organized by Notre Dame University Law School’s “Religious Liberty Summit”. I’m sure it was all about religious liberty for Muslims and Jews and Hindus and Buddhists, what with it being a speech by a Catholic justice hosted by a Catholic school in Rome.

It also seems hypocritical for a jurist-for-life who is supposed to be somehow above politics – at least in the fairy tales they told us in school – to opine on matters of current political events. Or to whine so shrilly about criticism leveled at him.

The part that is fundamentally corrupt has to do with the fact that Notre Dame’s Religious Liberty Initiative invited Alito and paid for his and his wife’s travel to – and lodging in – Rome. Imagine that! An all-expenses paid trip to the Eternal City! Now, consider that Notre Dame’s Religious Liberty Initiative filed an amicus brief in the Dobbs case, arguing for the outcome that Alito delivered.

This wasn’t a scholarly invite. It was a payoff. It was a transaction.