Samuel Alito Is a Symptom of the Right-Wing Disease

I don’t know what it is about the conservative mind, but man, do they love doing crimes.

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One of the most common side effects of political polarization is an unshakeable conviction that the other side is up to no good. The scope and frequency of human corruption and fallibility is such that wherever you land on the political spectrum, you’re going to get plenty of examples of people you dislike doing shit you think is wrong. In some cases, this is merely personal and embarrassing—like Hunter Biden’s various crimes and vices—but in others, political figures commit a specific and clear misuse of their power, either through greed or stupidity or malice.

On Tuesday, ProPublica revealed that Justice Samuel Alito, one of the Supreme Court’s six conservative judges, accompanied Republican billionaire megadonor Paul Singer on a luxury fishing trip to Alaska, and then failed to recuse himself from cases in which Singer’s interests came before the court. The ProPublica story is exhaustive and obsessively researched. There is little doubt that Alito knowingly did what he is alleged to have done. The story further reveals that before his death in 2016, Justice Antonin Scalia also took trips with Singer. After the revelation of Clarence Thomas’ cozy relationship with billionaire donor Harlan Crow, it’s hard to argue against the general point that conservative members of the Supreme Court are being bought wholesale by the same monied interests that run the rest of the Republican Party.

Alito’s response also speaks to this relationship, in the dumbest and funniest way possible.

When contacted by ProPublica, he didn’t even bother to muster up a statement. Instead, he was so furious at his integrity being questioned (for doing something clearly corrupt) that he immediately ran to the Wall Street Journal, which allowed him to publish an extremely dense and thoroughly unconvincing “rebuttal” to the article that reads like a legal brief. For example:

And as I will discuss, he allowed me to occupy what would have otherwise been an unoccupied seat on a private flight to Alaska. It was and is my judgment that these facts would not cause a reasonable and unbiased person to doubt my ability to decide the matters in question impartially.

Ok dude. You just happened to get a lil ride from a pal in an otherwise unoccupied seat on a private flight to Alaska.

Even if some of the facts detailed in the ProPublica article were coincidences or “honest” mistakes, Alito is cozy enough with the monied members of the conservative movement that it makes his presence on a supposedly nonpartisan judicial body pretty much bullshit. The conservatives are fucking corrupt, man. This shit happens all the time! It’s a bit surreal, to me, to have this so obviously and openly confirmed, while also knowing that for much of the country, stories like this will get chalked down to political polarization or a “biased media.” Who cares how the ProPublica staff votes! Their facts line up!

Even if you were to engage in some bogus thought experiment of “which party is objectively worse,” it’s hard to see the conservatives coming out on top. God knows we see Democrats doing heinous and corrupt shit all the time, but if we base our views on specific cases, like the Supreme Court, it becomes apparent that there is not exactly crime-parity here. Liberal members of the court have had their problems (RBG we’re looking at you), but they have not recently been brought up in the kind of incredibly obvious payola shit that it appears basically all the conservative heavyweights are engaging in.

Perhaps this is because the liberal members know that they would receive less leeway from a system designed to cater to these kinds of capital-friendly oopsies. Perhaps it is because several of the liberal justices aren’t members of the old boys club that Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh are. Would Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson commit similar sins if they thought they could get away with them? I’d like to think not, but who knows—like Alito and Thomas and so many before them, they are career judges who have sought and attained the highest seats in the country. Such an impulse does not reflect kindly on any who have it.

This rubric is flawed, of course. Maybe we hear overwhelmingly more news about corrupt conservatives than liberals because of the mainstream media’s general bias towards liberalism. You would think, then, that conservative outlets would have a better track record of bringing up charges that stuck to the left—and yet they do not. In any given election year most of the Murdoch media properties and various Koch-funded digital cesspools are a constant ticker-tape of spurious allegations of some kind of impropriety by Democrats. With that in mind, you could easily become convinced that there’s a good reason that these charges go nowhere while several members of the last presidential administration that nominated three Supreme Court Justices are now arrested, indicted, or currently imprisoned.

I don’t know what it is about the conservative mind that lends itself so readily to corruption—maybe the philosophy lends itself to individualistic interpretations of morality that make it easy to justify self-serving behavior, or maybe it’s just the easiest ideology for a piece of shit to adopt—but man, do they sure love doing crimes. The fact that we are just now getting a mounting body of evidence that this tendency has extended to the wildly overpowered judiciary branch of our government is a dire sign that things may be worse than we thought— or just as bad as many of us have assumed for years.