Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is feeling extremely persecuted these days, and the Wall Street Journal is there for him, amplifying his every complaint. It’s also there to gloss over suggestions that the raft of reports of ethical lapses by the conservatives on the court over the past few decades is nothing more than attacks by nefarious liberals.
“[T]his type of concerted attack on the court and on individual justices,” Alito complained, is “new during my lifetime. . . . We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances. And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us.” Those poor, poor conservative justices, with their well-paid jobs for life, enhanced by some very wealthy and generous friends.
That part of the interview with the WSJ is galling enough, but when Alito complains that the early leak of his decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization put his life at risk, it’s infuriating. “Those of us who were thought to be in the majority, thought to have approved my draft opinion, were really targets of assassination … It was rational for people to believe that they might be able to stop the decision in Dobbs by killing one of us.”