Here is James Fallows:
I think this interp is correct.
—Thomas gets all the attention.
—But Alito is the one who has defined, and utterly discredited, the current court.
Both are resentment-driven. But Alito is resentful about ... what, exactly? https://t.co/9RJIs1DEpv
— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) May 1, 2023
Alito has always been by far the worst Supreme Court justice. Whatever their faults, the others have some kind of of ideology and some sort of animating force that drives their decisionmaking. Alito doesn't. He simply votes in support of the Republican Party view and barely even tries to disguise the fact. He is the very definition of a hack.
Definitely the whiniest Justice as well. A guy who thinks that he's entitled to all the respect and dignity of a Supreme Court position not because he does anything to uphold it, but because he wears the robes.
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Gotta love someone who whines that people are complaining about "activist judges"... It's a special sort of cognitive dissonance that only the real experts (your Ben Shapiros et al) can truly manage.
It's really quite simple: they let women and blacks into Princeton when he was there, completely devaluing his own admittance.
Exactly. A POS extra special white guy, not so special after all.
Ah, the good old days of CAP.
But he may have a point. Princeton let Cruz in. Talk about devaluation.
😄😄😄😄
Sandra Day O'Conner reportedly despised Alito and regularly savaged his opinions whenever any of his Appeals Court decisions reached the Supremes. She resigned from the Court to care for her ailing husband secure that she would be replaced by John Roberts. Then Chief Justice Rehnquist croaks and HW Bush gives Roberts the position of Chief Justice. And then who ends up replacing Day O'Conner but her least favorite judge.
Sandra Day O'Conner was a conservative justice when the word conservative meant conservative. If Sam and Clarence are conservatives, then the word has become just a bunch of letters strung together.
Sandra was VERY careful to resign when a Republican was sure to replace her with a right-wing radical so I would not give her even a little bit of credit.
Justice Ginsburg ended-up with the same outcome. Perhaps she should have been more careful still.
It's a sad but true indictment of her tenure that RBG's single most significant decision while on the bench was to not retire in 2014.
Not the same outcome. RBG was replaced by someone dedicated to undoing everything RBG accomplished. Sandra hated Alito but mostly voted his way. (Mostly)
He lives in a bubble and doesn't understand why the servants don't love him. Or as Bob Dylan might have said--"there is something happening here but you don't know what it is--do you, Mr.Alito.
"He hands you a nickel, he hands you a dime,
he asks you with a grin if you're having a good time
then he fines you every time you slam the door.
I ain't gonna work for Sam Alito no more."
The judge, he holds a grudge
He's gonna call on you
He's badly built, he walks on stilts
Watch out he don't fall on you
"...Both are resentment-driven...." which absolutely disqualifies them from public service. But Fallows is right, Alito is some awful combination of an ideologue and a narcissist; he is not just a hack. Hacks know what is going on around them, whether or not they care. Ideologues cannot perceive reality.
and a snowflake
A whiney snowflake.
How will the degradation of the Court play out, though?
I thought the overturning of Roe would be shown to be a huge mistake when the bodies started stacking up from botched illegal abortions, but -- while that may yet happen -- what's really driving backlash against the Court's idiocy is the women like Amanda Zurawski whose lives are summarily put at risk when they are denied abortions over ridiculous concerns.
Did this even happen pre-Roe? At Catholic hospitals, probably it did, but generally, probably not: a physician would be focused on his patient's health, and not on some loopy law.
The current Supreme Court really is an illegitimate institution, however much Aliton wants to wail about it. A majority of the Court was OPPOSED in their nominations by Senators representing the majority of Americans, and three of them were nominated by a President who had lost the popular vote in his election.
This probably wouldn't be much of an issue, but these minority-supported Justices are fantastically activist, and their activism is contrary to the majority will.
I read somewhere that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that is pointedly not the case with the current Supreme Court.
It was deaths like this which finally got the law changed in Ireland. Letting a woman die for the sake of a doomed pregnancy was too much.
"I thought the overturning of Roe would be shown to be a huge mistake when the bodies started stacking up from botched illegal abortions..."
Dead bodies are easy to ignore, as we learned with Covid and Stand Your Ground and school shootings. Survivors are harder to ignore, as they can keep on talking to media. I suspect the real lesson conservatives are learning here is that: don't leave behind any survivors. Shoot to kill re: SYG and school shootings. And make sure the women with problematic pregnancies die. Very sick... but very American too to allow only the people who survive a tragedy to define how the tragedy occurred.
A man who believes the lint in his navel is the very thread of the universe.
My bead on Alito is this:
Alito figures he is entitled to the same near-worshipful reverence that the jurists of his youth, you know, the Earl Warrens, the Warren Burgers, the Thurgood Marshalls, etc. are spoken of in the halls of legal academia and to a large degree within society itself. They had this even within their own lifetimes; I'm just barely old enough that I recall when Thurgood Marshall retired basically the entire political establishment treated it as a hallowed event. Their decisions form the bedrock of much of modern society and underpin much of modern law.
Alito wants that. He wants it SO BAD he can taste it. And he's not getting it, and he seems, genuinely, baffled as to why. Because he's doing everything right; he's the ideological leader of a dominant court faction which is authoring immensely impactful decisions on the regular. He got to write a decision (Dobbs) that fundamentally upends a longstanding status quo and whose implications and effects will likely still be with us long after he's dead.
This, to him, entitles him to the same level of respect that the guy who wrote Brown got, because he's doing the same thing, right? And if he ISN'T getting that, it's because there's a vast social conspiracy that refuses to play fair; in his mind, it's something like "when the libs won everyone clapped; now we're winning, and instead of clapping people are jeering. This isn't fair."
Alito demands to be respected because he thinks he is due it, and if that respect isn't forthcoming, he'll vandalize the country to make himself feel better. It's positively Nixonian, except Nixon had a number of redeeming qualities.
You may be right, but you may also be overthinking it. Alito is just an asshole, and most assholes (even the ones who have accomplished nothing phenomenal on their own terms or on anybody else's terms) expect everyone else around them to give them respect, admiration and love. There are several Alitos in my family and they're all toxic, despite some of them having had no job higher than insurance underwriter, community college financial aid officer or department store warehouse clerk. (Not to denigrate any of those jobs, cause somebody's got to do them... but none of them warrant everyone around you treating you to daily accolades for being a Super Genius or Greatest Man Who Ever Lived or whatever that my uncles all seem to demand from their wives, children and other family members.)
Oh, I forgot total deference too. The Alito-male demands total deference from everyone else around them, especially women and minorities whom they feel should be grateful they're allowed to exist in the same universe as the Alito-male.
Your description of Alito, as believing he is entitled of high reverence, rings true in my mind. As discussed below (or above, depends on where WordPress deposits my response), it is also possible that he is just an asshole, but given the lofty position he is in and his total condescension regarding any opposing opinions, I am going with what you said.
He must be an absolute fucking nightmare for the more progressive SCOTUS justices, especially the women.
I think there is an entire branch of the Supreme Court that only breaths their own flatulence and are bewildered when the rest of the world calls them on the stench that they have stopped noticing.
"He simply votes in support of the Republican Party view and barely even tries to disguise the fact. He is the very definition of a hack."
I honestly don't see how at the very least Thomas isn't any different.
I'd also argue that the entire Republican constituency on this court is made up of partisan hacks, but the others are at least subtle or careful about it by prioritizing their votes. I guess that makes them simply ideologues? They're all simple political actors. At least with the Democratic appointees they appear to follow where the law leads, rather than making up reasons to decide a political issue out of whole cloth.
"I honestly don't see how at the very least Thomas isn't any different."
Thomas has at least one principle: he thinks oral arguments are pointless. He expresses his adherence to this principle by frequently sleeping through them.
Sad how the lack of respect coming from the left for the Supreme Court is at the same level of intensity as the hatred on the MAGA right for the FBI and DOJ.
If the SC had been making decisions liked by the left, there would be none of this personal animosity toward justices. They'd go from "hacks" to heroes, and the institution would be declared to be healthy and doing well.
have you read any of the opinions? if not, maybe you're just making broad generalizations that are wholly inappropriate.
Not just judicial opinions, Sam and Clarence both like to whine in the press about how badly they are treated, and then fly off on luxurious boondoggles where they spout more of their batshit crazy ideas.
Do the attendees applaud that nonsense because they support that nonsense, or to curry favor?
As per your usual rhetorical gyrations, you're making the word 'just' do a lot of heavy lifting.
Fck off troll.
Note the lack of "personal animosity" toward Neil Gorsuch, who's every bit as conservative as Alito and Thomas, in his own way. And given that Gorsuch watched his mother get pilloried by Democrats when she served in the Reagan administration, he has more right than either of them to feel some resentment.
And the Chief Justice, any perceivable "personal animosity" toward him? Anything like the mocking of him for whatever his seizure disorder is on conservative sites?
Gosh, it's almost like there's another reason for the animosity, other than political affiliation. Whatever could it be????
Clarence Thomas apparently spends an awful lot of his free time palling around with his billionaire friend on private megayachts and at private luxury resorts, conveyed to them by private jet.
And yet in a documentary on himself -- paid for by the same billionaire friend -- Thomas highlights that he is of "common stock;" that he prefers traveling around America via RV, and that he likes RV parks and WalMart parking lots.
No mention of the more luxurious vacations that seem to be his more typical outings.
I don't care what your political or judicial leanings are: that's just dishonesty. It's dishonesty that doesn't belong on ANY court of law. Why hide the fact that you like luxury, if it doesn't affect your rulings?
It basically shows contempt for the public: we are unworthy of knowing anything about him that he doesn't want us to know. Especially, it seems, if it raises questions about whether he tries to administer equal justice before the law.
Lack of respect == hatred?
Perhaps it's not resentment, but rather, a chip on his shoulder for not being the smartest kid in school or the best lawyer on his school's mock trial team?
You're all overthinking it. Alito is just a prime example of white male grievance.
I rather think Alito is a symptom of another problem: the Federalist Society.
Like the NRA, it has grown rotten to the core, its prime mission hijacked by those with a greed for money and power.
Alito seems to be a dyspeptic individual, one possibly lacking true close personal friends, seeing his life in its last chapter with his legacy undervalued, & becoming angered & somewhat irrational. He's mentally inhabiting the wrong century, one in which a man sentencing women to death for witchcraft is a reasonable judge.
Reminds me of Putin's recent decision making with an eye to history, however distorted.
Scalia died.
Now he has to do all of his own thinking for himself.
And his brain hurts.
What does Alito resent? The fact that the United States is not Catholic. His lifelong quest has been to de-secularize America, to insure that religion, and only Christianity, and only the Catholic variant of Christianity, and only the extremely dogmatic and conservative variant of Catholicism, is the central fact and purpose of American life.
There is a gracious plenty of evidence for this but the most recent instance is overturning Roe because abortion involves "possible life," echoing the church's verbiage about "God-possibled souls." That's the same language that prohibits contraception, by the way, so expect Griswold to be on the firing line as soon as they can get a case.
Shorter Alito: “Can’t you see this robe I’m wearing!?!”