Justice Samuel Alito told Fox News on Thursday what his plans are moving forward for remaining on the Supreme Court after Republicans’ blowout losses on Tuesday.
Namely, that he has no plans to retire and is committed through at least the end of the current term, which runs to late June.
For conservatives surveying the wreckage of Tuesday night, that is the single best piece of news of the week.
The context is unforgiving. When the new Congress is seated in January, Democrats control the Senate. Ron DeSantis thinks that control holds for at least six years. Run the map and you can construct scenarios where Republicans don’t take it back until 2033. Which means that for the foreseeable future, any vacancy on the Supreme Court is not an opportunity. It is a catastrophe. There is no version of a Democratic Senate confirming a Trump nominee to replace Samuel Alito, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Alito is 76. Clarence Thomas is 78. Between them they hold the Court’s conservative anchor, and the actuarial table is not a friend of the originalist movement right now.
So it is worth saying plainly what Alito has been, because the man has earned it.
He wrote Dobbs. Not a narrow procedural dodge, not a Chief Justice John Roberts special that splits the difference and leaves the thing standing — an opinion that said Roe was “egregiously wrong” from the day it was decided, traced the reasoning to its roots, and returned the question to the people and their elected representatives where it belonged. Fifty years of conservative legal scholarship pointed at that outcome, and most of the people who claimed to want it flinched when the moment came. Alito didn’t.
Then he absorbed what followed. The draft leaked. Crowds gathered outside his home in violation of federal law while the Attorney General found other priorities. A man was arrested near Brett Kavanaugh’s house with a weapon and a plan. Alito told Fox’s Shannon Bream he has a pretty good idea who leaked the draft but won’t name a person without proof sufficient to say so — which is, incidentally, exactly the standard a judge should apply, and exactly the restraint his critics never extend to him. He also noted the leak made him and his colleagues targets for assassination. That was not hyperbole. That was a description of his year.
He has taken the flag stories, the ethics-complaint campaigns, the ProPublica drip, the calls for recusal on every case that matters, and he has not blinked, not apologized for existing, and not drifted leftward in search of better press. That last part is the rarest quality on that bench. The gravitational pull of elite Washington approval has bent better-credentialed men than him. Alito appears to be made of something the pull doesn’t work on.
There is talk of a lame-duck session to fill seats before January. It would require Senate Republicans to move fast and ruthlessly in the window they have left, and the man asking to lead them is John Thune, who just spent two years demonstrating he will not do that.
Which brings us back to where we started. The institution conservatives can count on isn’t the Senate Republican conference. It’s a 76-year-old from Trenton who doesn’t care what the NY Times writes about him.
Stay as long as you can, Justice Alito. The rest of us will try to be worth it.
