Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has become the target of an unscrupulous attack by left-wing radicals who apparently feel that since they can’t alter the ideological makeup of the Supreme Court by winning elections, they’ll do it the old-fashioned way.
They’ll use smears, lies, gross exaggerations, and false and hysterical charges of wrongdoing to force conservative justices off the court.
Do you think it’s a coincidence that these attacks on Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Amy Coney Barrett are occurring when a Democratic president is in office?
Meanwhile, the “charges” against these justices are laughable — so much so, that CNN buried the lead in its piece detailing the charges against Alito and Barrett: “Neither Barrett’s real estate deal nor Alito’s appearance in Italy appear to violate any of the court’s ethics rules, according to several experts interviewed by CNN.” But here’s the smear anyway. Go ahead and feel free to spread it around.
It’s a “war against the legitimacy of the Supreme Court as a whole,” writes National Review‘s Noah Rothman. And it may be the most despicable, unscrupulous assault on the court as an institution in history.
Dan McLaughlin has led the way with his superior coverage of the Court’s conservatives, applying his depth of legal knowledge and jurisprudential history to dismantle ProPublica’s latest shoddy attack on Alito’s ethicality. He provides a bulletproof case against the outlet’s mere insinuations with the kind of thorough reading of the applicable statutes and self-set standards governing the institution’s disclosure rules that ProPublica couldn’t be bothered to perform. But Dan also delves into the history of justices, liberal and conservative alike, engaging in the banal conduct ProPublica insists is untoward.
“If they can’t get the results they like, they will do whatever it takes to burn down the institution’s public legitimacy,” wrote McLaughlin.
Rothman goes through the litany of vicious, unprincipled assaults on conservative judges. It should be noted that not one of them has gained any traction with the public or gone beyond the headline stage of media smears.
Apparently, it’s now fair game to insist that a fishing trip about which Justice Alito spoke openly requires him to recuse himself from yet-unidentified future cases. It’s fair game to insinuate that because John Roberts’s wife has a career — what remains of it after she gave up her profitable litigation practice in deference to her husband’s role on the Court — the chief justice is irreparably tarnished. It’s perfectly aboveboard to insinuate that Thomas is tainted by his friendships, the absence of any evidence of taint in his judgments notwithstanding. It’s entirely legitimate to allege with laughably scant evidence that Justice Kavanaugh committed or was involved in multiple sexual assaults, in an effort to keep him off the bench by any means necessary.
“No more. Not another inch. The architects of these smear campaigns must be stopped,” writes Rothman.
The key to these kinds of attacks is insinuation. You don’t need proof to insinuate, only a fact flake you can blow up into something it isn’t.
As is common now with these campaigns, these scant details serve as a platform from which left-wing advocates of Court “reform” allege that Barrett — like the rest of the Court’s conservatives — plays fast and loose with ethics rules. The judgments they render are therefore suspect.
Barrett’s “ethical lapse” was that she sold her private home in South Bend, Ind., to a recently hired Notre Dame professor “who was assuming a leadership role at the Religious Liberty Initiative, according to records discovered by the left-leaning non-profit watchdog group Accountable US.”
The Religious Liberty Initiative has had nine cases before the Supreme Court so, obviously, Barrett committed an “ethical lapse” by not recusing herself. Because she sold her house to a professor who was going to work for an advocacy group, Barrett is unworthy to sit on the high court.
Sheesh.
It’s not that these spurious charges severely injure the justices. The left is practicing a scorched-earth policy with the court by trying to undermine the moral authority of the Supreme Court so that conservative opinions will be delegitimized.
If you can’t beat ’em, blow ’em up.
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