Samuel Alito’s Bad Faith Has Been Laid Bare

For those of us with overactive bad faith sensors, it’s nothing short of fucking crazymaking to hear conservative Supreme Court justices pretend they are applying objective legal analysis to the country’s most pressing issues. 

The worst part: They’re so good at it, so well educated in how to pass off far-right policy making from the SCOTUS bench as nothing more than finely-tuned legal interpretation from people who have spent their lives thinking and learning about such things. Those interpretations just so happen to align perfectly with favored Republican policy outcomes. So it goes. 

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Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have been at the forefront of using the bullshit legal theory of so-called originalism to block any and all progressive policy making issues and advance every conservative policy shoved before the ultra-conservative Supreme Court. Alito and Thomas – along with the court’s other four right-wing justices, to varying degrees – have weaponized the U.S. Constitution to stop the country from modernizing and expanding rights to groups of people who just so happened to be left out of the constitution, as flawed as it is. 

On Friday, the Court's conservatives ruled that American lawmakers are not allowed to make any efforts to stop gun massacres. The massacres will continue until morale improves.

You’ve heard by now that Alito was caught by an undercover documentary filmmaker admitting he wants to help the right win “the moral argument” and “return our country to a place of godliness.” It was a badly-needed moment of judicial clarity from a man who has gladly taken on a leading role in unraveling the constitutional order and creating a political system in which Republicans cannot lose, no matter how deeply unpopular their policies are. Alito, in other words, is all in on rigging the system – primarily via the judiciary, which now dominates everyday American life – to make sure the left can never gain a foothold and make the structural changes needed to break the right-wing spell we are under. 

“One side or the other is going to win,” Alito told the documentarian, Lauren Windsor, flashing his culture warrior credentials and revealing just how much right-wing cable news he consumes (Supreme Court justices are just like our parents in this way; before he died, Antonin Scalia had gone from a thoughtful if conservative judge to a brain worm-infested cable news junkie repeating Sean Hannity talking points in speeches and in SCOTUS opinions. It was a sad – and inevitable – deterioration of a once-respected legal mind. The same cable news fever has radicalized both Thomas and Alito during the Trump era). 

They Cried As One: Sammy Said Nothing Wrong!

The right was quick to defend Alito’s comments for fear of the entire project’s bad faith being exposed all at once. Conservative pundits, including right-wing law professor Marc O. DeGirolami writing in The New York Times, refused to tackle the issue at hand and instead obfuscated by pointing out non-controversial comments Alito made in the surreptitious recording in question.  Why is the comically corrupt and helplessly political Justice Alito in such hot water, DeGirolami asked (in bad faith). All he said was that “there can be a way of working, living together peacefully” in an increasingly polarized country.

DeGirolami continued his defense of Alito by pointing out Alito said the Court has “a very defined role, and we need to do what we’re supposed to do.” Alito added: “That is way above us.”

Likewise, many people in this country do believe in God and godliness. Many believe in the truth of our national motto, “In God We Trust.” They think religion contributes to a kinder and more moral society. And many of these people — including Justice Alito, to judge from his brief assent on the recording — also think that greater godliness might help the nation today. Americans who think God has something to teach us about decency and love and moral rectitude would be surprised to hear that treated as a shocking or extremist view.

That Alito’s comments and his SCOTUS rulings align with the philosophies and beliefs of Christian nationalists curiously receives no mention in DeGirolami’s rabid defense of Alito. It’s as if admitting that your boy is working hand in hand with a radicalized political movement that believes the word of God and business suit-wearing, capitalism-loving Jesus should supersede the U.S. Constitution would be giving away the bad-faith game they’re all playing. The Christian nationalist movement, which supercharged its control of the Republican Party when its leaders in 2016 decided to hitch their proverbial wagon to a casino magnate who promised to end immigration and roll back constitutional rights, has come to define the modern conservative movement. Having a determined ally on the only court that matters is quite the coup for the movement.

DeGirolami knows this but cannot say it. He added that the only reason anyone would be appalled by Alito's comments to the filmmaker is because they have a personal vendetta against him. Sure.

The defense of Alito has been as vociferous as it is coordinated. The revelation that Alito is acting on a purely political basis in his role on the Supreme Court threatens to expose the effective bad-faith game the American right has played for generations, forcing mainstream media outlets and mainline Democrats to treat their judicial philosophy as legitimate and on par with any other approach to the law. Everything being equally good and bad is the operating principle by which 21st century culture and politics has operated. Until we break free from the scourge of bothsidesism, a legal approach as rife with dishonesty and bad faith as Alito’s will never be revealed for what it is. 

No one, of course, is actually a constitutional originalist. No lawyer or judge truly believes Americans should abide by the letter of the dead document we know as the U.S. Constitution. How do we know originalism is the fountain from which all bad faith flows? Because the same judges who claim to abide by the legal philosophy have made up something called the major questions doctrine, which I wrote about in July 2023:

Alito’s admission that he’s working to return the United States to some imagined “godly” past and save the nation from the left should serve as a wake up call for Democrats who are still, incredibly, not using an ounce of political capital to attack the lawlessness and corruption of the Supreme Court in the years after its far-right takeover. 

Reforming the judiciary in a way that waters down the power of radicalized Christian nationalists determined to roll back the 20th century should be the animating force behind all liberal and leftist efforts in the coming years. Democrats can take over as many statehouses as they want, they can build a hefty majority in the House and Senate, they can even hang on to the presidency for most of the next twenty years. But they can never take action that must be taken – on climate collapse, on the myriad horrors of capitalist excess, on voting rights and reproductive rights – without expanding the federal courts and filling them with real, actual judges who are not working in tandem with an anti-democratic political movement. We need a political party that doesn’t just want to shuffle chairs around the deck of the Titanic until the boat meets the ice. We need to turn that ship’s big ass all the way around. 

I’d like to offer a quick shoutout to everyone out there who hates that the Supreme Court is all that matters and how it has been weaponized against the left at every turn, yet decided to sit out the 2016 presidential election. It could very well be half a century before we can fix this disaster. I hope you vote in 2056. 

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social and on Threads and X at @CDCarter13.