The Patriot Post® · Alito Drops the Gloves

It seems that Sam Alito is tired of turning the other cheek.

For years now, the Left has been in a one-sided bare-knuckle fight to delegitimize the Supreme Court. This makes sense, given that the Court, which sits atop our nation’s third coequal branch of government, is the only one that has successfully resisted takeover by the Democrats. Indeed, the Supreme Court’s current 5-3-1 conservative majority is the only thing standing in the way of the Left’s utter dominance of the levers of American government.

If only it were as simple as stuffing ballot boxes.

It isn’t, though, and what’s the Left to do? Answer: attack. Specifically, it’s gone after the Court’s most reliably conservative votes — those of associate justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

Thomas has been a target for years because his rock-ribbed constitutionalism is made even more intolerable by the color of his skin. Recently, he came under attack for his longtime friendship with a man named Harlan Crow, who happens to be wealthy. As our Nate Jackson wrote in May: “They sometimes took trips together and did other things friends sometimes do. There’s no evidence that a single one of Thomas’s rulings, writings, or votes was compromised by his longtime relationship, or that Crow even had an interest in any case before the Court, but Democrats want you to think something bad happened because they don’t like Thomas’s rulings.”

The Left’s vehicle for sullying Thomas’s reputation was a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on “Supreme Court Ethics Reform,” which ostensibly focused on the personal connections of the justices.

Seeing the success of this line of attack, the Left has since turned its guns on Alito, who also happens to have a financially secure friend. The hatchet man for this attack is a left-leaning news organization called ProPublica, which deceptively and self-righteously claims to be “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force,” and which further congratulates itself by claiming to do “serious, fair, accurate reporting in the public interest [while winning] six Pulitzer Prizes” — as if there existed even a remote connection between journalistic excellence and Pulitzer Prizes.

ProPublica emailed Alito on Friday with a series of questions about his failure to recuse himself from certain cases due to his friendship with the aforementioned rich guy, Paul Singer, and about his failure to disclose as a gift an Alaskan fishing trip he took with Singer and others some 15 years ago. And ProPublica and asked him to respond to these questions by noon this past Tuesday.

“Alito’s decision was a masterstroke,” writes the Volokh Conspiracy’s Josh Blackman. “Rather than providing comments to ProPublica, which can be cherry-picked and quoted out of context, Alito spoke directly to the public.”

Alito chose an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal as his vehicle for responding. “ProPublica,” he began, “has leveled two charges against me: first, that I should have recused in matters in which an entity connected with Paul Singer was a party and, second, that I was obligated to list certain items as gifts on my 2008 Financial Disclose Report. Neither charge is valid.”

Alito then explained these matters and his legal and ethical obligations in painstakingly legalese detail — but also with just a hint of wry humor in language that we can all understand. For example:

I stayed for three nights in a modest one-room unit at the King Salmon Lodge, which was a comfortable but rustic facility. As I recall, the meals were homestyle fare. I cannot recall whether the group at the lodge, about 20 people, was served wine, but if there was wine it was certainly not wine that costs $1,000. Since my visit 15 years ago, the lodge has been sold and, I believe, renovated, but an examination of the photos and information on the lodge’s website shows that ProPublica’s portrayal is misleading.

As for the flight, Mr. Singer and others had already made arrangements to fly to Alaska when I was invited shortly before the event, and I was asked whether I would like to fly there in a seat that, as far as I am aware, would have otherwise been vacant. It was my understanding that this would not impose any extra cost on Mr. Singer. Had I taken commercial flights, that would have imposed a substantial cost and inconvenience on the deputy U.S. Marshals who would have been required for security reasons to assist me.

If that weren’t enough, Alito also broke out the Funk and Wagnalls: “See, e.g., Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language 690 (2001) (defining a ‘facility’ as ‘something designed, built, installed, etc., to serve a specific function affording a convenience or service: transportation facilities’ and ‘something that permits the easier performance of an action’).”

Suffice it to say that when a Supreme Court justice starts citing from the dictionary, it’s probably time for his interrogators to pack it in. Unfortunately for ProPublica’s intrepid “journalists,” it’s now too late: They’ve already been exposed for their pettiness, their sloppiness, and their rank activism.

By itself, this down-in-the-weeds back-and-forth between Justice Alito and ProPublica won’t make a lick of difference in the Supreme Court’s public approval rating. But that’s not the point. The point is that by counterpunching his attackers, Justice Alito made it clear that he won’t be a sitting duck, and that he’ll drop the gloves and defend his institution when he deems it necessary. That’s a good thing. Otherwise, unfounded attacks such as these will become commonplace, and the Left’s efforts to delegitimize the Court will gain momentum.

As for ProPublica, if it can’t pound the facts, and can’t pound the law, we suppose it’ll have to pound the table.