Samuel F. Alito

BA, Princeton University JD, Yale University

In January 2016, when the Republican Party candidates for president assembled in Houston for a debate, Ted Cruz lamented the GOP’s history of placing jurists on the Supreme Court. “The reality is, Democrats bat about 1.000,” he said. “Just about everyone they put on the court votes exactly as they want. Republicans have batted worse than .500. More than half of the people we put on the court have been a disaster.”

Cruz was complaining about the occasional semi-“liberal” votes of John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, the notoriously independent David Souter, and even, now and then, Antonin Scalia. Cruz—the only politician in our lifetime famous for being despised as much by his own party as by the opposing party—couldn’t have been too crazy about Sandra Day O’Connor, either.

Now, you and we might ascribe those justices’ deviation from the GOP party line to the fact that, as the saying goes, “reality has a liberal bias.” Meaning, the liberal position on certain issues is so obviously the fair, just, and correct one that even career conservatives are forced to acknowledge it from time to time, if through legally gritted teeth.

But not all of them.

Clarence Thomas dependably hews to the far-right line. And who can blame him? Already knowing how you’ll vote allows you to take a nap on the bench during oral arguments and still wake up refreshed and revived, unconcerned about what was said in your mental absence.

And then there’s Samuel F. Alito. Dubbed “Scalito” for his Mini-Me lockstep agreement with the older, more senior Scalia, Alito has proved to be the conservative’s conservative—except when a Democrat is president, at which time he gets a little cute with the rulings.

What kind of man is Alito? He’s the kind of man who as a kid was a big Phillies fan, played second base in Little League, and dreamed of a career in Major League Baseball—as the commissioner. When serving on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, he ruled in favor of cops who, armed with a warrant allowing them to search a suspected meth dealer, decided also to strip-search the suspect’s ten-year-old daughter. Don’t act surprised. The Founders would have done the same thing, if they had been there and if they had known what meth was.

Also while on the Third Circuit Court, Alito held against people alleging race, age, gender, and disability discrimination; in favor of an individual’s right to possess a fucking machine gun; and for imposing strict waiting periods for women seeking abortions.

This has been his pattern: to defend the rights of institutions at the expense of individuals (unless they’re white Catholic men). He voted for Citizens United, supporting corporate “personhood” and permitting unlimited expenditure of cash in federal elections. He held in favor of Hobby Lobby and that company’s “religious” objection to paying for its employees’ contraception. He sided with the majority in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, which made it harder for women to bring unequal-pay lawsuits.

Confused? It’s simple: corporations are “people,” and have an unlimited right to express themselves with money, as though an unlimited ability to influence an election isn’t the very definition of corruption. People, however (especially women-type people), aren’t entirely people, and have circumscribed rights to control their own bodies, to be free of restrictions imposed by employers’ religious beliefs, and to sue for equal treatment.

Alito was a big promoter of the “unitary executive” theory, the notion that the president had virtually unlimited powers and could exercise them via “signing statements.” He held in favor of the Pentagon in one Guantánamo-related case, and with George W. Bush, who nominated him for the Supreme Court in 2005, in another.

And yet, once Barack Obama became president, Alito found himself concerned about presidential overreach. He held in favor of two challenges to the Affordable Care Act and expressed dismay at Obama’s exercise of power with regard to immigration and the regulation of greenhouse gases.

In sum, Samuel Alito is a principled conservative who doesn’t let being principled impede his ability to be, if not always conservative, certainly dependably Republican. He’s not the opera buffa villain that Scalia was, but he is nonetheless capable of scowling and sighing and looking pissy while hearing arguments he doesn’t like, and mouthing “Not true” during one of Obama’s State of the Union addresses.

He would have made a lousy MLB commissioner, too.