Hi, this is Dahlia Lithwick, and we are sharing an opinion-pollusa bonus episode with

our Slate Plus listeners following Thursday's

clutch of opinions and justice Samuel Lido's non-recusal letter and totally

rational and ethical and unbiased defense of the rational and ethical

and unbiased decision to fly flags over his various homes.

We are sharing a preview of that conversation with you right here, but if you want to listen to

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Slate Plus. Go to slate.com slash Amicus Plus to access all of our extra episodes. Here is Mark Joseph Stern and me on the monarchic

Supreme Court's self-crowned king. So there is a substantive problem that we're starting to pick up on and that it is Justice Alito in recent weeks making very real and very serious errors in his opinion writing that are actually prompting, and you've

been tweeting about this, corrections from sources that he cites to say, no, actually my work reflects the opposite of what you're saying and

I'd love for you to just unpack that mark because it is more of the I'll tell you what

truth is.

Yeah so this happened most recently in the Alexander case about racial gerrymandering in South Carolina,

where Justice Alito cited the Brennan Center to support the

proposition that the racial turnout gap is growing, that racial minorities

are voting less, white voters are participating more, and Alito said,

well that leads to the conclusion that racial data is actually less useful in drawing maps so we should just assume that the map

drawers in this case despite targeting with surgical precision 30,000 black residents

and shifting them to a different district to prevent them from

flipping the one they were in to Democrats. He said we should just assume that

everything was above board and innocent because this racial data, look guys it's

useless not enough black people vote for it to be of any use.

...