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Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito
Photo:
olivier douliery/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
The political campaign against the Supreme Court continues, relentlessly, and the latest example is a claim that eight years ago Justice
Samuel Alito
leaked word ahead of time about a Supreme Court ruling. We’d ignore this except that Democrats and the anti-Court media are treating it like a capital offense.
To call this story uncorroborated is to overstate its credibility.
Rob Schenck,
a pastor who has since turned against his former evangelical allies, claims he heard from a woman who heard from Justice Alito at a dinner party in 2014 about the pending opinion in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, a religious liberty case. Justice Alito denies leaking anything, and the woman denies hearing about it.
But this summer, after the Dobbs abortion decision, Mr. Schenck decided that what he claims to have learned in advance of the Hobby Lobby decision should be shared with the world. He wrote to Chief Justice
John Roberts
with concern about the gossip. When the Chief didn’t respond to Mr. Schenck’s satisfaction, he turned to the media, and then Democratic Sen.
Sheldon Whitehouse
piled on.
Mr. Whitehouse is famous for his tenacious digging into Justice
Brett Kavanaugh’s
high-school yearbook. He and Georgia Rep.
Hank Johnson
have written to the Chief demanding that the Court investigate this alleged ethical breach or they will do it.
This is another case of political intimidation in the service of undermining public confidence in the Court. The accusation is second-hand hearsay from a politically motivated source. The woman and her late husband did attend a dinner party at the home of Justice Alito and his wife after donating money to the Supreme Court Historical Society. But that’s the extent of any corroboration.
Add this to the list of attacks on all of the center-right Justices: the attempts to disqualify
Clarence Thomas
because his wife believed claims about 2020 election fraud and asked the White House chief of staff to do something; the claim that
Amy Coney Barrett
puts her Catholic faith above the law; the claim that
Neil Gorsuch
wouldn’t wear a Covid mask, though Justice
Sonia Sotomayor
supposedly asked him to; and the smears against Justice Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings.
The overriding charge is that the Court has ethical problems that require fixing, but it all adds up to nothing. The only real ethical violation was the leak of Justice Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs by a still-unknown leaker. The ethics concerns are a smokescreen. The real reason Democrats are upset is because they’ve lost the Court as a backstop legislature for policies they can’t get through Congress.
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Appeared in the November 23, 2022, print edition as ‘Targeting Justice Alito.’
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