Tag Archives: Alito

Justice Alito’s Masquerade

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A not-so-hypothetical state law of the near future:

“It is the policy and law of the state of [Gilead aka Any Republican-Controlled State] that the purpose of females in society is to serve the interests of males in all matters. Therefore, the legislature hereby declares:

    • The crime of rape in which a male forces a female, by violence, intimidation or otherwise, to engage in sexual intercourse is abolished;
    • Any female forced to engage in sexual intercourse as stated in section (1), must, if impregnated, take every measure to assure to the maximum extent medically possible that the child thus created be born alive, regardless of the circumstances of its conception or any medical issues involving its birth, survival, or future existence;
    • Any female who fails to comply with section (2) hereof shall be guilty of the felony of murder in the first degree and shall be punished by death.
    • Any female convicted under section (3) hereof shall submit to such medical tests as are necessary to determine paternity and shall forfeit all her property rights to the male who impregnated her.”

Seems insane, I know, but given the theocratic posturing of Republicans and their insistence on a society in which women’s rights are subordinated to those of men, it is not beyond imagining that the removal of constitutional protections for abortions will lead to state statutes similar in substance to the one set out above. In fact, multiple Republican-controlled states have already enacted severe restrictions on abortions with no exceptions for rape and incest.

In a recent post I raised some serious ethical concerns about the relationship between Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife’s involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. I mentioned some issues related to Justice Alito’s November 12, 2020, speech before the Federalist Society, the far-right organization whose vetting and approval is essential for appointment of judges that Republicans in the Senate support. A rough transcript of the Alito speech can be seen at https://otter.ai/u/ezh-387rQb7p7Yq87udbMb4Eovk if you have the stomach for it.

In light of Alito’s remarks, just over a year ago, it was no surprise that he had authored the majority Supreme Court opinion that was leaked to and reported by Politico. https://politi.co/3s96yA6

Alito opened his Federalist Society speech with an homage to the role of the Society as a bastion of free speech, open dialogue with, he claimed, no political or other agenda, ignoring, among other things, the role it plays in vetting conservative candidates for judgeships, including on the Supreme Court. Keeping with his theme of what he was not speaking about, Alito noted the “previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty” that arose during the pandemic but insisted,

I am not saying or even implying, I am not diminishing the severity of the viruses threat to public health. And putting aside what I will say shortly about a few Supreme Court cases, I’m not saying anything about the legality of COVID restrictions. Nor am I saying anything about whether any of these restrictions represent good public policy. I’m a judge, not a policymaker.

Then,

All that i’m saying is this. And I think it is an indisputable statement of fact, we have never before seen restrictions as severe, extensive and prolonged as those experienced, for most of 2020. Think of all the live events that would otherwise be protected by the right to freedom of speech, live speeches, conferences, lectures, meetings, think of worship services, churches closed on Easter Sunday, synagogues closed for Passover on Yom Kippur War. Think about access to the courts, or the constitutional right to a speedy trial. trials in federal courts have virtually disappeared in many places who could have imagined that

Alito continued –

the COVID crisis … has highlighted disturbing trends that were already present before the virus struck. One of these is the dominance of lawmaking by executive Fiat rather than legislation. The vision of early 20th century progressives and the new dealers of the 1930s was the policymaking would shift from narrow minded elected legislators, to an elite group of appointed experts in a word, the policymaking would become more scientific. That dream has been realized to a large extent. Every year administrative agencies acting under broad delegations of authority churn out huge volumes of regulations that dwarfs the statutes enacted by the people’s elected representatives. And what have we seen in the pandemic sweeping restrictions imposed for the most part, under statutes that confer enormous executive discretion?

We had a covid related case from Nevada. So I will take the Nevada law as an example. Under that law, if the governor finds that there is, quote, a natural technological or manmade emergency, or disaster of major proportions, the governor can perform and exercise such functions, powers and duties as are necessary to promote and secure the safety and protection of the civilian population. To say that this provision confers broad discretion would be an understatement.

Now, again, let me be clear, I’m not disputing that broad wording may be appropriate in statutes designed to address a wide range of emergencies, the nature of which may be hard to anticipate, and I’m not passing judgment on this particular issue. statute,

I want to make two different points. First, what we see in this statute, and what was done under it is a particularly developed example of where the law in general has been going for some time, in the direction of government by executive officials, who were thought to implement policies based on expertise. And in the purest form, scientific expertise.

Second, laws giving an official so much discretion can of course, be abused. And whatever one may think about the COVID restrictions, we surely don’t want them to become a recurring feature after the pandemic has passed. All sorts of things can be called an emergency or disaster of major proportions. Simply slapping on that label cannot provide the ground for abrogating our most fundamental rights. And whenever fundamental rights are restricted, the Supreme Court and other courts cannot close their eyes.

When I read that, my first reaction was that a politician like Ted Cruz was speaking, making a classic right-wing anti-deep state conspiracy claim. The speech reads like a game of “which cup is the pea under,” with Alito repeatedly disclaiming the intention to make the very points he was making.

Alito next attacked the leading precedent for the constitutionality of public health measures, Jacobson v Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11, decided in 1905. He started with a judge joke that would appeal to the ultra-conservative audience:

The case concerned an outbreak of smallpox in Cambridge, and the Court upheld the constitutionality of an ordinance that required vaccinations to prevent the disease from spreading. Now I’m all in favor of preventing dangerous things from issuing out of Cambridge and infecting the rest of the country and the world. It would be good if what originates in Cambridge stayed in Cambridge.

Almost as if signaling the lawyers waiting to challenge the national health policy regarding COVID, Justice Alito offered up multiple grounds for limiting and distinguishing Jacobson in the future and segued into a discussion of “religious liberty” with the observation that,

It pains me to say this, but in certain quarters, religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right. And that marks a surprising turn of events.

Noting that a Supreme Court decision in 1990 (Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872) had “cut back sharply on the protection provided by the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment,” Alito noted that Congress promptly passed, and President Clinton signed, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act with nearly unanimous support.  But, according to Alito,

today that widespread support has vanished. When states have considered or gone ahead and adopted their own versions … [t]hey have been threatened with punishing economic boycotts.

Some of our cases illustrate this same trend.

Note that the majority opinion in Employment Division was authored by none other than Antonin Scalia, the leading icon of the conservative judiciary and originalist thinking on the Supreme Court (the Constitution must be interpreted according to its “public meaning” in the late 18th century). Scalia wrote:

We have never held that an individual’s religious beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that the State is free to regulate. On the contrary, the record of more than a century of our free exercise jurisprudence contradicts that proposition….

Respondents urge us to hold, quite simply, that when otherwise prohibitable conduct is accompanied by religious convictions, not only the convictions but the conduct itself must be free from governmental regulation. We have never held that, and decline to do so now.

This precedent, apparently, was a bridge too far for Alito who appears to believe that the assertion of any religious grounds for conduct exempts that conduct from state regulation. The mind boggles.

His speech then launched into a protracted series of complaints about the Supreme Court’s treatment of religiously motivated “good works,” even if, and perhaps especially if, they lead to discriminatory treatment of people outside the penumbra of a particular religious belief. Such belief, Alito appears to believe, despite all the denials, is by itself a sufficient basis to permit denial of services to others not committed to the same ideas.

For many today, religious liberty is not a cherished freedom. It’s often just an excuse for bigotry, and it can’t be tolerated, even when there is no evidence that anybody has been harmed….

The question we face is whether our society will be inclusive enough to tolerate people with unpopular religious beliefs.

Alito likened the trend he perceived to the treatment of Germany and Japan after 1945: “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.”

Alito reviewed with disdain the Supreme Court’s treatment of the COVID pandemic, arguing that deferring to state governors on public health grounds led, in Nevada, to opening the casinos and,

“So if you go to Nevada, you can gamble, drink and attend all sorts of shows…. But here’s what you can’t do. If you want to worship and you’re the 51st person in line, sorry, you are out of luck. houses of worship are limited to 50 attendees.”

And on and on.

Since I am now at risk of writing a critique as long as the original speech (almost 5,000 words), I will cut this short. Suffice to say that the tone of Alito’s remarks was consistent with the tenor of the draft opinion released by Politico. And while Alito initially focused on religious freedom, he also complained that “Support for freedom of speech is also in danger.” His main reference there was to “things you can’t say if you’re a student or professor at a college or university or an employee of many big corporations.”

He also specifically complained that the Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage had led to claims of bigotry against people who continued to assert that marriage was the union between, and only between, one man and one woman. Repeating “old beliefs” in public was predicted to lead to accusations of bigotry, just as Alito and other dissenters had expected.

Alito was clearly playing to the prejudices and fears of the arch-conservatives in the Federalist Society. He complained about attempts of individual senators to influence the Court’s decision-making, labeling a brief a group of them filed as an attempt to influence it by means other than legal argument and referencing another country where tanks were brought to bear against a high court in another country.

Following a likely-obligatory shout out to Scalia again, Alito ended his tirade with this signal [corrected for obvious transcription issues]:

… in the end, there is only so much that the judiciary can do to preserve our Constitution, and the Liberty it was adopted to protect. As Learned Hand famously wrote, Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can do much to help it. For all Americans, standing up for our constitution and our freedom is work that lies ahead. It will not be easy work.

Taken as a whole, this, speech resembles the work of politics, not law.  It is an ultra-conservative judge speaking to an ultra-conservative political body and, in words more elegant than those typically used by Donald Trump, warning them that their religious liberty and other “rights” are at risk from liberals bent on helping “others” and placing their needs ahead of those of “true Americans.” It appears now that with Alito’s draft opinion in circulation, the ultra-right is on their chosen path to having the state control the lives of females who comprise about half of all Americans. Welcome to Gilead.

I will have more to say about the irreconcilable paradox of Republican conservative politics in the next post. For now, it is sufficient to observe that the idea of lifetime appointments has been fatally undermined. No country, certainly not this one, can withstand the theocratic authoritarianism that has infected the Supreme Court under the phony guise of “religious liberty.”

The Stench from the Bench

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The Washington Post reported recently that Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch would join Mike Pence, Ron DeSantis, and Trump’s White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany in speaking to the Federalist Society. They did and the media, as reported, was excluded. https://wapo.st/3 Jua6Dz  Even rev.com, the repository of many political speeches, could not acquire a transcript.

 I have it on pure speculation, good enough in a Trumpworld, that in a rare act of dexterity, Mike Pence got off his knees and stood erect at the podium during his portion of the show. One wonders how he was received given his shocking one-time decision to comply with the Constitution and the law in connection with Trump’s ongoing attempt to overturn the 2020 election by whatever means will work for him, including violence against the police.

A related question is hanging regarding DeSantis who swings between sycophantic adoration of Trump and hints that he may run against Trump in 2024. McEnany has no such problem. She’s not running for anything but the money. Her connection with the truth is so remote she could satisfy her obligations by just sending a copy of Big Little Lies to sit on the podium during Pence’s talk.

This wasn’t Gorsuch’s first such speech. He did a victory lap at the Federalist Society in November 2017 just after his confirmation to the Supreme Court. https://politi.co/3LySkRt Not surprisingly, perhaps, the only other Justice present then was Justice Alito who has spoken to the Federalists multiple times. In Gorsuch’s 2017 speech, he,

vowed to continue to expound the group’s favored judicial philosophies from his new post. “Originalism has regained its place and textualism has triumphed and neither is going anywhere on my watch,” the justice vowed.

Very interestingly, neither the Supreme Court nor the Federalist Society would say whether Gorsuch was paid to appear and, if so, by whom. Why, I wonder, would they not answer that simple question if he were not going to be paid? Refusing to answer in this context is analogous to pleading the 5th Amendment.

To be fair, it is reported that “liberal justices” are also “often guests of progressive organizations such as the American Constitution Society.” Despite all of that, or because of it, the justices are making public statements defending the high court’s impartiality and integrity. Retiring Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in his book that,

“Political groups may favor a particular appointment but once appointed a judge naturally decides a case in the way that he or she believes the law demands. It is a judge’s sworn duty to be impartial, and all of us take that oath seriously.”

Well, maybe not “all of us.” The sordid conduct of some Justices has now reached the nadir of ethical practice. Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, has defended the court’s “independence” during a lecture at the University of Notre Dame, but failed to mention that his wife, Ginni Thomas, is an avowed right-wing sycophant and Trump lover. She has been widely reported to have played a role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, has argued far and wide that the 2020 election was stolen, and on and on. And now, we have reports that Ms. Thomas texted multiple times with Mark Meadows, then serving as Chief of Staff to Trump, that Meadows should do everything in his power to overturn the election.

As you likely recall, Thomas was the sole dissenting vote in the case about whether Trump had to turn over documents to the January 6 Select Committee. In Thomas’s participation in that case, there was no mention of his wife’s activities and no apparent concern about the grotesque conflict of interest, or appearance thereof. He apparently thinks he has no disclosure obligations, no recusal obligations regarding participation in cases in which his spouse is actively and aggressively interested.

Something is rotten here – ‘here’ meaning ‘right here,’ not Denmark – and the stench, has only gotten worse in recent days.

Lest we forget, judicial “ethics” also did not stop conservative icon Antonin Scalia from taking trips paid for by … someone not him. Indeed, according to New York Times reporting, Justice Scalia took more than,

258 subsidized trips … from 2004 to 2014. Justice Scalia went on at least 23 privately funded trips in 2014 alone to places like Hawaii, Ireland and Switzerland, giving speeches, participating in moot court events or teaching classes. A few weeks before his death, he was in Singapore and Hong Kong. [https://nyti.ms/3Dk8fPE]

A private individual provided Scalia with a free room at his ranch even though he had business before the Supreme Court. Again, according to the Times,

legal experts said they saw nothing wrong with Mr. Scalia’s accepting a free room at Mr. Poindexter’s lodge. While the Ethics in Government Act, adopted after Watergate, requires high-level federal employees, including judges, to fill out disclosure reports for reimbursements worth more than $335, the visit to the ranch might not have required a formal disclosure, because accommodations provided by a private individual are exempt under current rules.

WHAT????

All my years in private practice I fretted over conflicts of interest issues and Supreme Court justices can accept luxury hotel accommodations if they’re provided by “private individuals?!?!” No wonder “Supreme Court members took 1,009 paid trips between 2004 and 2014.” According to my calculations, that averages to 11 trips per year per Justice. And these are not trips to Bridgeport.

The destinations often are luxurious, including the Casa de Campo Resort in the Dominican Republic, where Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. was listed as a speaker for an event last February, or Zurich, where Justice Scalia traveled at least three times on privately funded trips.

In 2011, a liberal advocacy group, Common Cause, questioned whether Justice Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas should have disqualified themselves from participating in the landmark Citizens United case on campaign finance because they had attended a political retreat in Palm Springs, Calif., sponsored by the conservative financier Charles G. Koch. Mr. Koch funds groups that could benefit from the ruling. The disclosure report filed by Justice Thomas made no mention of the retreat. It said only that he had taken a trip, funded by the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group, to Palm Springs to give a speech.

Over roughly a decade, Justice Scalia took 21 trips sponsored by the Federalist Society, to places like Park City, Utah; Napa, Calif.; and Bozeman, Mont. The Federalist Society also paid for trips by Justice Alito during that period, but not for any liberal justices, the disclosure reports show.

The disclosure reports, such as they are, reportedly “show that the majority of the privately funded trips — by far — are sponsored by universities.” Maybe, but it’s a fair bet that on those trips, the Justices don’t stay in dorm rooms. Are we to believe the suggestion that universities paid to send Justices to Singapore, Hong Kong, Ireland, and Switzerland? I also note that universities are sometimes litigants or amicus curiae (friend of the court) in cases of major importance.

The cited Times story about all this was published almost exactly five years ago. At that time legislation was pending in Congress to “require the Supreme Court to create a formal ethics system, beyond the Ethics in Government Act, like the one that governs actions of all other federal judges. That system is known as the Code of Conduct for United States Judges.” It should say “United States Judges Other Than Supreme Court Justices” because it apparently does not apply to them in any meaningful way – each of them decides for himself whether his conduct raises ethical concerns.

Chief Justice Roberts has argued that the Supreme Court, even though it generally abides by this judicial ethics code, is not obligated to do so. It restricts how much judges can be paid for private travel, and limits other activities outside the court, such as allowing private organizations to use “the prestige of judicial office” for fund-raising purposes.

Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, said that society could benefit when justices — who are paid about $250,000 a year, far less than they would earn in private practice — leave Washington to speak about how the court works.

“Society could benefit.” Perhaps, if that’s what the Justices always spoke about to other judges, law students and the like. Somehow, I doubt that’s what Scalia was talking about in Zurich.

Self-policing is a nice concept but fails in practice a good deal of the time. And since the Supreme Court is the top of the third branch of government, enshrined in the Constitution and the final word on the constitutionality of state and federal laws, self-policing seems a particularly inapt way of assuring fair, neutral decision-making.

The sitting Chief Justice has defended the current approach by arguing that the Justices “consult the code for lower-court judges in assessing their own ethical obligations.”  They may “consult” but are not bound to follow.” Extraordinary.

The “both sides-ing” of the ethical issues involving speeches and political leanings by Justices cannot be allowed to obscure the fundamental obligation of judicial neutrality embodied in the American Bar Association’s Model Code of Judicial Conduct [bolding is mine] set out below, along with the corresponding Code of Conduct for United States Judges.

ABA: CANON 1
A judge shall uphold and promote the independence, integrity, and impartiality of the judiciary, and shall avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety.

Judges’ Code: Canon 1

A Judge Should Uphold the Integrity and Independence of the Judiciary.

 ABA: CANON 2 
A judge shall perform the duties of judicial office impartially, competently, and diligently.

Judges’ Code: Canon 2

A Judge Should Avoid Impropriety and the Appearance of Impropriety in all Activities

ABA: CANON 3
A judge shall conduct the judge’s personal and extrajudicial activities to minimize the risk of conflict with the obligations of judicial office.

Judges’ Code: Canon 3

A Judge Should Perform the Duties of the Office Fairly, Impartially and Diligently

ABA: CANON 4
A judge or candidate for judicial office shall not engage in political or campaign activity that is inconsistent with the independence, integrity, or impartiality of the judiciary.

Judges’ Code: Canon 4

A Judge May Engage in Extrajudicial Activities that are Consistent with the Obligations of Judicial Office

 Judges’ Code: Canon 5

A Judge Should Refrain from Political Activity

The Judges’ Code is accompanied by a lengthy commentary on each section that only a lawyer can appreciate. Suffice to say that, in substance, the ABA Code and the Judges’ Code are essentially the same.

A commission appointed by President Biden to consider some of these issues stated in its report that “this voluntary system may not be the best approach to conflicts of interest that may affect the public’s perception of the court. “It is not obvious why the court is best served by an exemption from what so many consider best practice,” the report said. Indeed, a masterpiece of understatement.

Ironically, I suggest without a hint of irony, Justice Alito who often speaks at the Federalist Society’s meetings, had this to say at its November 2020 convention:

Judges dedicated to the rule of law have a clear duty. They cannot compromise principle or rationalize any departure from what they are obligated to do. And I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not do that in the years ahead. When we look back at the history of the American judiciary, we can see many judges who were fearless in their dedication to principle …. [https://bit.ly/3uEG2iE]

Many, but not all, it seems. Furthering the irony, Justice Alito’s very next words were, “and one who is especially dear to the Federalist Society springs immediately to mind I’m referring to Justice Antonin Scalia.” To quote the infamous Mr. Barry, I am not making this up. I will have much more to say about J. Alito’s extraordinary speech in a future post.

Most of the comments I have read about this issue constitute the highest [lowest?] form of tiptoeing by the graveyard. The stench of politics wafting from the High Court is gag-inducing. The pussyfooting by Democrats only makes it worse: “Justice Thomas’s participation in cases involving the 2020 election and the January 6th attack is exceedingly difficult to reconcile with federal ethics requirements.” https://wapo.st/3DqCQLB “Exceedingly difficult?” Really?

This is the same Justice Thomas and his wife, Ginni, whose text messages to Mark Meadows, Chief of Staff to Trump urged Meadows and Trump to “stand firm” in pursuing legal strategies to overturn the election she claimed was stolen from Trump. In keeping with the circus-of-the-obvious that Washington has become, Democrats in Congress were shocked, yes, I say, shocked, and even “outraged” to learn of these messages. https://wapo.st/35r6N1C

Now some experts see problems with this sordid example of non-self-regulation:

Legal ethicists, even some who in the past have been sympathetic to the notion that justices’ spouses are entitled to their own political activities, said the revelations presented a serious problem for the Supreme Court.

“The public is going to be deeply concerned whether a justice can be fair when his wife has been such an active participant in questioning the outcome of the election,” said Steven Lubet, a professor and judicial ethics expert at Northwestern University law school.

Louis J. Virelli III, a Stetson University law professor who wrote “Disqualifying the High Court: Supreme Court Recusal and the Constitution,” said that “this situation is problematic” considering the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by hundreds of Trump’s supporters. “It is so stark.” [https://wapo.st/3LtMno4]

Not surprisingly to anyone with a functioning mind, “Congressional Republicans came to Clarence Thomas’s defense.” Names: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, leading House shrieker, Jim Jordan. Icons of ethical conduct, every one. Some of them, McConnell in particular, it is said, oppose Thomas even recusing from January 6 cases. We should not be surprised since the last Republican known to believe in democratic principles appears to have died some time ago.

Experts in judicial ethics seem to be falling all over themselves to avoid speaking the dreaded words: RESIGN. The lawyerly hair splitting is disturbing because this is not a problem curable by disclosure or recusal in this case or that. The High Court may well end up deciding multiple cases arising from the January 6 attack and the conspiracies that led up to and followed it.

Even if recusal, the step short of resignation, were adopted by Thomas for those cases, the Court would be deprived of one voice and one vote in an already small group of decision-makers. The burdens on other Justice would increase and the possibility of tie-votes on crucial constitutional issues would increase. Ginni Thomas’s own words proof how tone-deaf and substance-indifferent she and her husband are: ““Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work.” Sure.

Just imagine:

“How was your day, honey?”

“Fine. Just the usual run-of-the-mill insurrection cases, you know, the attempts to overthrow the government. But you know we can’t talk about that, right?”

“Of course not, so let me tell you what I did today….”

More rules and self-enforcing principles of recusal do not serve the interests of the United States, which should be the only focus here. The interests and feelings of Justice Thomas and his wife are irrelevant. They brought this problem on themselves, and the country should not bear further the costs of their conduct. Thomas has already shown himself to be indifferent, at best, to the high ethically duty that should be the watchword of every Justice on the Court. Resignation is the only appropriate remedy, and it should be forthwith, before more interference with the Court’s business and more impairment of its already wounded reputation occur.