Why Is Alito Like This
Opening Arguments
Opening Arguments Media LLC
4.3 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 20 May 2024
⏱️ 70 minutes
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Summary
OA 1034
With the recent news that a sitting Supreme Court justice was publicly displaying support for Trump’s attempted coup in the days between January 6, 2021 and Joe Biden’s inauguration, it’s time to ask: Is Samuel Alito actually worse than our very low opinion of him? Also who could have possibly known that a hard-right Reagan/Buckley conservative who has been publicly advocating for ending abortion rights since 1985 would turn out to be the ultra-right Trump/Scalia conservative who ended abortion rights in 2022? We take these questions on after a quick look at the latest low point in Rudy Guiliani’s long, steep, and often hilarious fall from grace. (N.B.: there’s so much more to talk about here than we could possibly fit into an hour, we didn’t even get to his awful decisions on the death penalty, among many other things.)
Finally, we learn the answer to last week’s T3BE question and consider the multifarious liabilities of stocking a private lake full of piranhas.
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Alito’s 1985 memo with strategies for overturning Roe v. Wade
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Doe v. Groody, 361 F.3d 232 (3rd Cir. 2004)(Alito dissent in qualified immunity case involving strip search of a 10-year-old girl)
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A Tiger on the Court: Sam Alito ‘72 at Princeton, Princeton Alumni Weekly (March 8, 2006)
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Justice Samuel Alito: ProPublica Misleads its Readers, Wall Street Journal (6/20/23) (Alito op-ed)
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Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court’s Plain-Spoken Defender, Wall Street Journal (7/28/23) (editorial drawn from 4 hours of interviews with Alito)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I hate the Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint. |
| 0:23.0 | This is not a First Amendment thing. |
| 0:26.0 | I printed out a sign especially for him using his favorite font, Garamand. |
| 0:30.0 | Who has a favorite font? I read on the internet that it's not against the law for me to go to the bathroom while the |
| 0:37.0 | Fest and seatbelt sign is on, so... |
| 0:39.0 | Seatbelt sign is on. |
| 0:40.0 | But is it against the law though. Hello and welcome to opening arguments. |
| 0:47.0 | This is episode one thousand thirty four. |
| 0:49.0 | I'm your host Thomas Smith. |
| 0:50.0 | That over there is real life crimmigration attorney Matt Cameron how you |
| 0:53.6 | doing Matt if you can't find me about tomorrow morning you must dismiss the |
| 0:56.3 | indictment |
| 0:58.6 | yeah you can I can't make you do an episode if you evade it you don't want to do one and I don't find you within a length of time, |
| 1:04.7 | you're free to go. Those are the rules. What are we going to do? |
| 1:07.2 | Yeah, referencing of course if you didn't see it. Rudy Giuliani never fails to best himself at being bad at the law. Like he's really... Just incredible. He was a lawyer. He was like an important. He was lawyer, right? |
| 1:20.0 | The lawyer. He was like, I mean, you don't get to be the top prosecutor at SDNY. |
| 1:25.0 | Without being a real piece of shit. |
| 1:26.0 | Oh, no, sorry, you were going to say to him. |
| 1:28.0 | Without hating poor people and people of color. |
| 1:31.0 | Right, yeah, no, you have to be one of the best at doing that, that's right. |
| 1:34.9 | But also knowing the law. |
| 1:35.9 | Yeah, I mean that's quite a fall. |
... |
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