Court critic drops bomb: Alito 'doesn’t care' that he's flagrantly partisan

Pamela Carlin, the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery professor of Public Interest Law and a founder and co-director of the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at Stanford Law school, has argued 10 cases before the Supreme Court. And during that time, she’s come to an assessment about Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito: the man is a partisan hack — and he makes no bones about it.

They don’t care if they make the court “look nakedly, openly political,” said Carlin speaking on Slate’s Amicus podcast with host Dalia Lithwick.

“They have just decided they have the power right now to undo the second Reconstruction, and they’re happy to do that,” said Carlin. “And they don’t care that it’s obvious that that aligns with a particular wing of the Republican Party … When you now have a Republican Party, especially in the south, that has no interest whatsoever in attracting Black votes. … [I]t’s a party that is not interested in being a multiracial, multiethnic party.”

Carlin took particular issue with the court’s recent move to “eviscerate the Voting Rights act of 1965,” which is a statute that President Johnson called the “most monumental act in the history of American freedom” when he signed it and which Carlin said President Ronald Reagan referred to as “a crown jewel” when he signed the reauthorization of the act in 1982.

Consider the court’s recent 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, wherein the court struck down a Louisiana congressional map drawn to include a second majority-Black district. The ruling found that intentionally creating districts to satisfy Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) constitutes an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

But that’s the character of someone like Alito, said Carlin.

“[W]hen Justice Alito applied for a job in the Reagan Justice Department, he said that the thing that inspired him to go to law school and to care about constitutional law was his dislike of … the decision to apply one person, one vote to legislative elections and say, ‘you can’t have one district that has 100,000 people in it and another district that has 700,000 people in it,’ the way some states did prior to one person, one vote,” said Carlin. “So this is a guy who from very outset of his career has disliked the Supreme Court’s democracy protecting decisions and has decided to do something about it.”

And they did. With abandonment of precedent, the Roberts court with Alito in lead has “completely reversed” what the Supreme Court did 40 years ago, she said.

“What he has said is, essentially, as long as the Republican Party is willing to screw over white Democrats, it’s free to screw over Black people as well, because Black people vote overwhelmingly in the south, in particular for candidates who are Democrats,” said Carlin, adding that Alito has warped the court to thoroughly that now it is proclaiming “not only aren’t we gonna protect you, but we’re not gonna let Congress protect you either” with response laws.

“[What] Justice Thomas and Justice Alito and the chief learned is you’ve got the power now, but you may not have the power five or ten years from now. You’ve got justices, Justice Thomas and Justice Alito, in particular, who really dislike the second Reconstruction,” she said. “I mean, they really, really dislike it. And they have the power to get rid of something they really, really dislike. Why not take it? Especially if your view of American institutions is as cynical as theirs seems to be.”