By Chuck Hobbs
Through the years, I’ve never hidden my many misgivings with United States Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, and while I disagree with his conclusions on most of the cases and controversies that our nation’s highest court considers each term, I’ve always suspected that it’s the “how” he reaches his decisions that irks me to no end.
The “how,” mind you, is Alito’s belief that he is actually doing God’s will on the Supreme Court, which is WRONG and patently against the very Constitution that he swore to uphold when he was appointed to the Court by President George W. Bush back in 2006.
Yesterday, both The Hill and NY Times ran articles about Justice Alito being caught on audiotape confirming what I have always suspected, which is that he cannot leave his Catholic faith at the door when he enters his office and dons the black robe each day.
During last week’s $500 a plate Supreme Court Historical Society gala, Lauren Windsor, a liberal journalist who often poses as a conservative activist while taping conservative political and judicial leaders talking freely at events, struck up a conversation with Justice Alito—never letting him know that she was “wired for sound.”
During their chat about the hyper-polarization of modern politics, Alito said, “One side or the other is going to win,” adding, “There can be a way of working, a way of living together peacefully, but it’s difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised.”
Baiting Alito to get further to the main point, Windsor said:
“I think that the solution really is like winning the moral argument…Like, people in this country who believe in God have got to keep fighting for that, to return our country to a place of godliness.” Hooked like a fish by the reference to God, Alito excitedly responded, “I agree with you, I agree with you.”
For what it’s worth, I do NOT like hidden cameras and surreptitious audio tapings at all, but I do know that the rules for such differs depending upon where you live. Here in Florida, both parties MUST give consent for a conversation to be recorded, so perhaps that fuels my own feelings on the matter? When I finally publish my memoirs, Tales from the Courthouse, some of you may find a bit of humor at the time one of my former clients, who was accused of statutory rape, was caught taping a trial prep session by my investigator—and what I did in response when he didn’t want to give up his cell phone.
But in other states (and in Washington, D.C.), a single party can turn on their cell phone or tape recorder and tape another person freely—a fact that makes Ms. Windsor’s recordings last week in D.C. very legal, even if subjectively distasteful.
Digressing to the substance of today’s essay, it is my fervent belief that Justice Alito should face recusal petitions in each and every case that even remotely deals with a moral question—or implicates religious rights because he clearly is beholden to the Religious Right by his very own admission on tape!
Alito’s stance is wrong, mind you, based upon the very FIRST Amendment to the Constitution, one that expressly provides that NO laws can be made to ESTABLISH a state religion, or prevent the FREE EXERCISE of religion! These are not Ol’ Hobbs’s words, but the words of James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington ‘nem, also known as the “Founding Fathers,” the men who did NOT want their new nation to be a Christian theocracy because they saw how the Anglican Church in Great Britain—and the Catholic Church throughout Europe—dominated the political and social scenes for centuries on end in the Old World.
Now, due to the Free Exercise Clause, Justice Alito has every right to practice Catholicism in his private time, just as Jewish and Protestant members of the Court have had the same rights since 1787. But Alito knows fully well that he, like his colleagues and judicial predecessors, is supposed to do his level best to prevent his personal parochial predilections from seeping into his legal analysis of cases before the Supreme Court. Thus, when he not only admits that he understands the current political polarization, but also believes that conservatives must do their parts to “bring America back to a place of godliness,” such is wholly unethical and shows his inability to be a fair and impartial jurist!
If I had been privy to that conversation, I would have tried to delve even deeper by asking Justice Alito when was America ever godly; was it godly when millions of Africans were enslaved during the first 16 presidential administrations up to and during the Civil War? Was it godly when millions of Native Americans were victims of genocide and their lands were being pilfered by state and federal governments? Was it godly when racist Jim Crow statutes and Chinese Exclusion provisions were deemed lawful by his predecessors on the Supreme Court?
Hundreds of Black men, women, and children were killed, and millions in Black owned property was destroyed or stolen by government aided racist white vigilantes in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. Were such acts godly?
I doubt that Justice Alito would have wanted to engage me in that conversation too much, but it would have been fun to watch him squirm and try to justify those and other unjustifiable and UNGODLY chapters in American history.
Over 300 Lakota Indians were massacred at Wounded Knee by the U.S. Army in 1890. Was that massacre godly?
In the end analysis, at least there now exists a record that proves that Justice Alito is biased despite his constant exhortations that he is impartial! Whether that will lead to some level of censure from his colleagues or widespread requests for recusal, as I suggest herein, remains to be seen. But at least the tools to attack Alito are now front and center, and here’s hoping that future Senates will have the wisdom and courage to vet judicial nominees in a way to root out those who would have more allegiance to their religious denomination than to the notion of “equal justice for all” under our existing laws.
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