Opinionpalooza: The Court of King Alito
Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
Slate Audio
4.6 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 31 May 2024
⏱️ 5 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Business as usual at the Supreme Court is the institutional response to the unusual business of Justice Samuel Alito’s letter writing about his flag-flying wife. In this bonus episode for Slate Plus members, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern knit together the yarns of jurisprudence with injudicious symbolic support for insurrection and christian nationalism - so you don’t get lost in this tangle. As the justices hand down cases and turn down congressional requests for recusal, Dahlia and Mark trace the link between bending the facts and discarding the record to suit Justice Alito’s narrative in his opinions, in his non application of the ethics code, and in his lack of humility in the flag fiasco.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, this is Dahlia Lithwick, and we are sharing an Opinion Palooza 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. |
| 0:25.8 | We are sharing a preview of that conversation with you right here. |
| 0:29.7 | But if you want to listen to the episode in full, you need to sign up for our membership program at Slate Plus. |
| 0:36.0 | Go to slate.com slash amicus plus to access all of our |
| 0:41.1 | extra episodes. Here is Mark Joseph Stern and me on the monarchic Supreme Court's self-crowned |
| 0:47.6 | 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 |
| 1:13.4 | reflects the opposite of what you're saying. And I'd love for you to just unpack that, |
| 1:17.8 | Mark, because it is more of the, I'll tell you what truth is. Yeah. So this happened most recently |
| 1:25.7 | in the Alexander case about racial gerrymandering in South Carolina, |
| 1:30.5 | where Justice Alito cited the Brennan Center to support the proposition that the racial |
| 1:38.8 | turnout gap is growing, that racial minorities are voting less, white voters are participating more. And Alito said, |
| 1:47.8 | well, that leads to the conclusion that racial data is actually less useful in drawing map. |
| 1:53.8 | So we should just assume that the map draws in this case, despite targeting with surgical precision |
| 1:59.5 | 30,000 black residents and shifting them to a |
| 2:02.2 | different district to prevent them from flipping the one they were in to Democrats, he said, |
| 2:06.9 | we should just assume that everything was aboveboard and innocent because this racial data, |
| 2:11.5 | look, guys, it's useless, not enough black people vote for it to be of any use. |
| 2:15.1 | The Brennan Center responded and said, oh my God, |
| 2:17.9 | Justice Alito, you completely misunderstood our work. You, in fact, got it backwards. If you had |
| 2:23.4 | actually read the report you cited, and by the way, he cited a blog post that was several years old |
| 2:29.0 | instead of a much more recent and comprehensive and lengthy analysis of all of these issues that would have |
| 2:36.3 | made it even clear why he was wrong. Brennan Center said what we actually showed in that |
... |
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