Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Samuel Alito (Photos: Gage Skidmore/Flikr and Free Malaysia Today/Creative Commons)
Justice Samuel Alito was triggered by his colleague Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Thursday at the U.S. Supreme Court as the two were reading the rulings on the final dozen, or so, decisions for the term. According to one CNN reporter, Alito was "stone-faced" and made excuses for himself after her comments.
Speaking about the incident, CNN's Dana Bash teased the comments by calling it "really explicit" in their ideological divide.
"It really was an and it boiled over in this one encounter between Justice Alito and Justice Sotomayor," agreed Joan Biskupic, CNN's chief Supreme Court analyst.
After Alito finished reading the decision that involved migrants seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, which dealt with the language over whether someone had "arrived" or "not arrived" in the United States, Sotomayor stepped in.
Biskupic explained that the debate over that case involves U.S. Border Patrol agents who will block people from "arriving" in the U.S. by preventing them from stepping over the border.
After Alito finished explaining why it was a "perfectly legitimate for the administration to do — to block these asylum seekers," the analyst said that Sotomayor stepped in to say, "I have a dissent here."
Justice Alito paused, Biskupic said, "So, he must have known that something was coming from her."
She addressed the "moral imperative of allowing asylum seekers who are fleeing serious persecution from coming to America, allowing them to come to America."
“The consequences of today’s decision are predictable,” she read. “More people will die. More people will attempt to cross the border illegally, and some will make it while others will not."
She then began citing specific incidents of the U.S. turning back people who were later persecuted and killed. She recalled the infamous incident involving the voyage of the M.S. St. Louis, in 1939, in which 937 passengers, almost all of whom were Jewish refugees, attempted to flee to the United States from Nazi Germany. It first went to Cuba and then to the U.S. The Americans turned them back.
"She finishes," continued Biskupic. "She takes, you know, about three times as long as Sam Alito had taken to deliver the actual opinion. And the first thing he says before he starts to recount the temporary protected status opinion that 'If I had known what the dissent was going to say I would have explained my ruling more.' And he just sits there kind of stone-faced, and everyone's like wow, and you know he definitely suggested he was blindsided."
Biskupic added, "I have a feeling that she might have said, maybe right before they were going on the bench, you know, 'Hey Sam, I've got something to say. But then he goes, with anger dripping from his voice to then detail what happened, what they were ruling in the temporary protected status case is."
Justice Elena Kagan had her own dissent in that second case, but chose not to read it, Biskupic said, "probably because there had been enough fireworks for the morning."