- [Narrator] Funding for this edition of One-On-One with Steve Adubato has been provided by The New Jersey Education Association.

NJ Transit.

Your ride to the world’s game.

PSEG Foundation.

New Jersey Sharing Network.

The Burke Foundation The Fund for New Jersey.

RWJBarnabas Health.

Learn More at RWJBH.org.

NJM Insurance Group.

Serving New Jersey’s drivers, homeowners and business owners for more than 100 years.

And by IBEW Local 102.

Lighting the path, leading the way.

Promotional support provided by NJ.Com.

Keeping communities informed and connected.

And by BestofNJ.com.

All New Jersey in one place.

- This is One-On-One.

- I'm an equal American just like you are.

- The way we change Presidents in this country is by voting.

- A quartet is already a jawn, it’s just The New Jawn.

- January 6th was not some sort of violent, crazy outlier.

- I don't care how good you are or how good you think you are, there is always something to learn.

- I mean what other country sends comedians over to embedded military to make them feel better.

- People call me 'cause they feel nobody's paying attention.

_ It’s not all about memorizing and getting information, it’s what you do with that information.

- (slowly) Start talking right now.

- That's a good question, high five.

(upbeat music) - Hey, everyone, Steve Adubato.

You know, for those who watch our program on a regular basis, you know that I'm fascinated by terrific authors who write about compelling, important, impactful figures in American history.

And this program is all about that author and that person.

The author is Peter S. Canellos.

He is the author of the book, "Revenge for the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement."

Peter, it's an honor to have you with us.

It's a fabulous book.

Thank you for joining us.

- Thank you so much, Steve.

- You got it.

Let's do this.

Sam Alito, an incredibly important person, not just in the judicial system in our country, but in our country, impacting public policy, impacting a whole range of aspects of our lives, including the overturning of Roe v. Wade and him writing that decision, that Dobbs decision we'll talk about in a moment.

For those who don't know who Sam Alito is and his roots to New Jersey, please talk about that, Peter.

- Well, Sam Alito is really kind of an emblematic figure, I think for New Jersey, and particularly for the community that he came in.

But he also shares a lot of characteristics with people who led the conservative legal movement, which, you know, now has come to dominate American law.

He's the son and grandson of immigrants.

His father was a baby when he came.

His mother was born one year after her parents came to the United States.

Both sides of the family were from the Chambersburg neighborhood of Trenton.

His grandfather worked in the Roebling Steelworks, which a lot of people did back then on his mother's side, and that was the fortunate, that was the fortunate grandfather.

You know, it wasn't one of these, you know, mega, we remember the United Auto Workers heyday.

It was a tough going when you worked in that plant, but at least it was a stable job.

His other grandfather who worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad was frequently laid off and family had to scrounge for housing and things.

So it was a real hard scrabble background.

But I think his grandparents felt like the sacrifices they were making was for their children and grandchildren, especially their grandchildren, because his parents were very ambitious and they were very self-made.

They earned their own money to get through college.

They both were teachers, then his father, of course, worked with the legislature, and he, I think Sam Jr.

was considered sort of the flower of the family, that all of their sacrifices were designed to give him a better life, give him a chance at education, give him a chance to succeed.

That sense of kind of empowerment that comes from that kind of an immigrant story, I think is one of the things that motivated the conservative legal movement.

Now, we think of that as a very positive thing, and I think that it is a very positive thing.

But I can also see how people would say, you know, this generation came of age at a time when they thought they were ready to conquer the world, and yet you had all the social changes of the '60s coming down on them.

You had the anti-war movement, you had feminism, you had civil rights, you had greater inclusion.

And they felt sort of at odds with that.

And they saw the Warren Court with its liberal decisions as sort of pushing the country in a different direction.

And I think that's how it all kind of came together for the conservative legal movement.

- The Warren Court, Earl Warren, the Warren Court, so many important decisions during that time.

But I'm curious about this, the title of the book, "Revenge for the Sixties."

So much of what you write about, Peter, when you talk about Sam Alito as an associate justice in the Supreme Court, Former US Attorney in the state of New Jersey, there's a resentment, there's a, not from you, there's a description of Sam Alito who's angry, who's frustrated.

And he went to Princeton, then he went to Yale Law School.

He had the best education, one of the best brightest students.

What was he so angry about, Peter, and do you believe that has impacted his role in the judicial system, particularly as a member of the Supreme Court?

- I think what he was angry about is he felt that the social changes that he witnessed when he was at Princeton, and which he felt very personally when he was at Princeton and Yale, I think he felt that they were offensive to his background and his beliefs.

Growing up a devout Catholic, growing up in a family with that sort of strong sense of Americanism and identification with the immigrant story.

He went to Princeton and I think when he entered as a freshman, he felt like he had kind of conquered the world.

You know, Princeton's only 12 miles from Trenton, but it's eons in terms of like, an Italian kid coming out of- - I'm a Rutgers guy from New Brunswick.

Princeton was very far away.

I leave it at that, go ahead.

- I know, I mean, I say in the book, it's kinda like that, it's like the richest house in town with the walls around it and stuff like that.

And he was able to get into that.

I think he felt like his kind of life was made, but then he had a series of things that had probably, in retrospect, you could describe as traumas, right?

He was in the last all male class, and as soon as women started arriving his sophomore year, you know, there started to be pressure for like, women to live in the dorms, or couples to sleep over together and things like that.

And I think for somebody of a conservative kind of Catholic set of beliefs, and we know this 'cause I talked to his classmates, you know, those sort dorm room bull sessions, he felt a lot of pressure as a person, as a social conservative in that environment, you know, it was very uncomfortable for him.

He was also an ROTC.

His dad had been a World War II veteran.

I think he believed in the concept of serving your country.

And yet he was in, I think only 27 members of the Army ROTC in his class, in the height of the Vietnam War protests and younger generations I think can't understand just how deeply he felt the pressures that the Vietnam War, worried people who could be drafted any day, certainly as soon as they graduate from college into service, into a war they didn't believe in.

And in 1970, when he was in the spring of his sophomore year, Nixon announced that there was the incursion into Cambodia, that the United States had been fighting in Cambodia.

This war that everybody thought was ending was actually expanding.

People on the campus were so opposed that students were so opposed and faculty supported them.

There was a student strike, right?

And Alito, you know, his friends say, first of all, he didn't participate in the protests because he didn't agree with the protest.

And he has said that, but also they said that he was deeply offended that exams were canceled.

You know, I think his idea was that he needed to, he needed to get those straight A's to power his career.

And he blamed richer, wealthier, more privileged students who were protesting for feeling like they could always go to their daddy's law firm.

And he had to prove himself.

So it was a very traumatic time for him at Princeton.

- So, this, by the way, I get the book "Revenge for the Sixties."

Peter Canellos is the author, if you want to know who Sam Alito is and what has shaped his opinions, not just him, but the conservative movement, the 6:3 majority that the conservatives have on the court.

That doesn't mean they vote 6:3 all the time, but in 1973, when Roe v. Wade becomes the law of the land and abortion becomes legal, it has a massive impact on Sam Alito and the movement, the conservative movement.

First of all, tell everyone what the Federalist Society is, and trust me, there'll be a connection here.

What's the Federalist Society?

What does it have to do with Alito?

And I'll complicate it for you, Peter, then connect it to the 50-year effort plus to overturn Roe v. Wade.

- There are a lot of questions in there.

- I know.

Take it one at a time.

- I'll take it one at a time.

I'll take it one a time, yeah.

So he's at Yale, he's a first-year student at Yale.

And he is from a conservative Catholic pro-life background.

He's already been fighting this fight because he was assigned a very liberal professor for his constitutional law class and he's warring with this sort of slightly hippie professor that he disagrees with.

Then Roe v. Wade comes down and the two leading academic critics of Roe v. Wade, John Hart Ely and Robert Bork, were there at Yale Law School when he's a first-year student.

And they created a very powerful critique.

They were saying, Bork especially, and both Bork and Ely said that this was not about abortion in their minds, this was about limits on judges' powers within the Constitution.

These judges were acting out of line, they were going beyond the Constitution to sort of create a right that they believed the framers never intended.

And I think that made a very powerful impression on Sam Alito, certainly made an impression on a lot of other people, some of whom were politically opposed to abortion rights, some of whom were just lawyers who felt like, you know, there needed to be tougher standards within the Supreme Court.

And those are two separate ideas, but they kind of eventually merge into one when we see the Federalist Society develop.

It started in the early 1980s, really at the dawn of the Reagan era.

And it brought together disparate conservatives, some of them libertarians, some of them social conservatives who believed that the law was going in the wrong direction, who were reacting against Roe v. Wade and some of these decisions.

And it became this kind of informal network by which people would get jobs in the Reagan administration, and judgeships, and clerkships, and conservatives could come together and talk.

And Sam Alito was one of the earliest beneficiaries of this.

You know, he joined the Federalist Society that participated in their events, and he started getting promoted within the Reagan administration, and particularly by Ed Meese, Reagan's second Attorney General, who was also personally very close to Reagan.

- So he joins the administration.

He's a conservative.

Does he acknowledge that he's a Republican at that point?

- I think that's an interesting question, actually.

I think that he acknowledged being a conservative, and he talked in 1985, they've actually forced him to write a memo about his conservative beliefs.

And he talked about William F. Buckley, about the National Review, about disagreeing with the Warren Court decisions and things like that.

Interestingly, he never identifies a Republican, at least in that memo.

But I think part of it is that his father who had played this role, this ever expanding role in the New Jersey legislature was such a dedicated nonpartisan.

I think that up to a certain point, Sam Alito Jr.

believed that identifying with electoral politics was kind of dirty.

It compromised you.

Nonpartisanship is the way to go.

So interestingly, I'm not sure he identified as a Republican.

By the time he was working in the Reagan administration, though, it probably wasn't that much of a question.

You are working in a Republican administration, you're a Republican.

- Yeah, let me also be clear, I said this to Peter earlier before we got on the air, I knew Sam Alito's dad.

I was joining the state legislature in January of 1986.

I was 25 coming into the legislature.

Sam Alito was the Executive Director of the Office of Legislative Services, a nonpartisan, the nonpartisan staff of the legislature.

They advised legislators about how to write bills, what was constitutional, what wasn't, whole range of things.

And I don't know what Sam Alito's politics were because they never came into play, the father.

Here's what's ironic to me, the Federalist Society, and I will not get on my soapbox 'cause this is Peter's segment, not mine, but I'll ask the question this way.

He joins the Federalist Society, he's part of an original, they believed in the original Constitution that judges were not supposed to make policy, originalism, that politics should not have a place, you shouldn't be engaged in policy.

The irony to me is that in the eyes of many, Peter, that is exactly what Sam Alito has done.

He did it in writing the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade.

Okay, he does it most recently in a court case.

He writes the majority of decision, if I'm not mistaken, in which the court decided in 6:3 vote that race should no longer be a factor impacting how congressional districts are reapportioned.

Which in fact, de facto, there are a whole range of minority members of Congress who are gonna lose their seats.

Now, the question becomes, and by the way, is very supportive of President Trump.

Very.

Question, not to mention the fact that his wife, Sam Alito's wife, very supportive of President Trump.

Look it up.

All the things he said about not being political, not being partisan, has he been true to that from your analysis?

- Well, he has changed and people who knew him back in Mercerville where he grew up, people who knew him at Princeton, people who knew him when he was even a circuit court judge in Newark for 15 years, they are surprised.

I talked to many of them at each sort of stop in his life.

And they are very, very surprised to see that he's become more caustic, more partisan, more outspoken.

He sort of pushed the bounds of judges sort of inserting themselves into the political realm by giving speeches at the Federalist Society and things like that.

You know, he all but incited conservatives to object to certain, you know, masking requirements and social distancing requirements.

- During COVID.

During COVID.

- COVID, during COVID.

So they are shocked that this person who they saw as a quiet, generally friendly person, who sort of went about his business, and if anything, hid his politics, now is essentially flouting his politics.

And that is one of the big questions in the book, you know, what happened and what changed?

An there are two dimensions to it, Steve, as you suggested.

The first is a question of sort of bait and switch.

So the conservative legal movement says we believe in restraint.

It was the Warren Court that was out there pushing their politics into the law.

What we wanna do is return to sort of an original quiet posture.

John Roberts said during his confirmation, "No one goes to the ball game to see the umpire.

The best justices are the ones you never hear about."

That's not been the case, certainly, with Sam Alito.

You know, you've heard about him a lot in all those cases that you mentioned.

And, you know, if you contrast the statements that he made, even as latest as confirmation hearings in 2006 where he said a judge cannot have an agenda, you have a solemn responsibility to follow the law, not to make the law.

It's a dramatic change.

Now, people will say- - Peter, stay right there, Peter, I'm gonna add something as you're saying this.

- Yeah.

- It's not, okay, someone's gonna say, "Well, it's not Justice Alito, it's his wife, Martha-Ann Alito."

They displayed two flags in their home in Virginia, an upside down American flag and an Appeal to Heaven flag in their New Jersey beach home.

Many news reports have come to the conclusion that those flags were in many ways connected to the stop the steal symbolism of the election.

So how is it that he's supposed to be an umpire calling balls and strikes backing away?

"I'm not partisan."

Is he now saying, "That's my wife, that's not me"?

That's their home.

Doesn't that communicate clearly and in totally unambiguous terms, "Yeah, I'm with Trump, I believe the election was stolen.

That's who I am."

It's totally not originalism based on the framers of the Constitution, or do I have that wrong?

- Oh, I think, well, what I would say is like if we had Sam Alito here in this conversation- - What would he say?

- He would say, I think he would say, you know, "That is my wife.

She's an independent person.

She did it.

I got her to take it down.

I think it was not appropriate, but this was my wife.

It was a neighborhood dispute.

She'd been provoked, whatever."

He would say those kinds of things.

On the other hand, I think that if you put that together with the decisions that he's made on the bench and with other aspects of his outspokenness, like, we were talking about, you know, going sort of beyond the normal bounds of talking about the law to kind of incite people to take on the social distancing requirements and things like that.

You know, he is an outspoken person.

He is a devout conservative.

He goes and speaks before very, very conservative Catholic groups and gets awards from them and things like that.

- He does.

So I don't think that he's really fighting his conservatism at this point.

Now, maybe if he were here, he would say, "Look, you know, you're under so much pressure and so much scrutiny and all of that, that at some point you have to live your life and be yourself and say, show who you are."

But again, I think you would have a much harder time contrasting that with things that he himself said in 2006 at his confirmation hearing about the role of a judge.

And that's where I think you're right, Steve, for sure, is that, you know, he says, "We can't have an agenda, we can't have politics.

We can't, we have to do what the law requires and not what we believe as politicians."

And there is plenty of evidence that he has played a role in pushing the law to the right significantly in very politically contentious cases.

- Including, and this is not political, it is not partisan.

Just consider this.

The Constitution says that a president has two terms.

You leave office, particularly after Roosevelt stacking the court, all that, going to the fourth term.

We understand why it's two terms.

Also, if you lose an election, you leave office.

Okay, then there's January 6th.

So if he's all about the Constitution, all about the rule of law, where was Sam Alito, as it relates to those who attempted to overturn the election, violently attack police officers and attack members of Congress?

Or is he silent on that?

- He actually was in favor of taking some of the cases from the states that were challenging some of the election results.

So he was not completely silent on those cases.

I will say, look, let's suppose Donald Trump tries to connive to run for a third term and things like that.

There has to be for members of the conservative legal movement, it may be Sam Alito is one of the outliers of this, but for others within the Federalist Society, within the conservative legal movement, they can't have entirely forgotten their core principles.

They may have moved away from them, they may have been persuaded that there are justifications for some of these other cases that they have done.

But when you adhere to an originalist philosophy that starts with the text of the Constitution and text of the Constitution says, "Birthright citizenship, you're born here, you're a citizen."

And the text of the Constitution, which was that particular amendment, came after Franklin Roosevelt.

So it's not like the Roosevelt precedent can ever be invoked here.

It's after Roosevelt.

It said two terms only very explicitly.

I don't know that, you know, maybe, we don't know where Sam Alito was gonna (indistinct), he may use his legal mind to try to justify some other things that Trump does.

But I don't think all of the conservatives are gonna fall into line on that.

And I think that, you know, in an odd way the Supreme Court is the last bulwark against Trump and the Supreme Court conservatives are, and they're gonna have to be measuring their conscience on some of these things.

- We have a couple minutes left.

The book is "Revenge for the Sixties."

Peter Canellos is the author.

"Sam Alito, the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement."

Last question from my perspective, Peter.

Sam Alito matters greatly in American history because, finish that sentence.

- Well, first of all, he delivered the conservative legal movement's biggest victory, it's a great white whale in Dobbs.

And he also played a very central role, the central role in expanding the rights of religious plaintiffs to object to anti-discrimination laws and things of that order, particularly against the LGBTQ community.

And these are major changes in the law.

This is not just adhering to original intent, as you were saying.

These are things that stretch the law, that changed the law.

And, you know, history is gonna have to judge, right?

Where are we gonna be in 50 and 100 years?

That will sort of determine how people view Sam Alito.

If we are in a place where people are very comfortable with the idea of no abortion rights and religious objections to laws and living in kind of that type of libertarian world maybe, maybe Sam Alito looks good.

If you're gonna be in a society that continues to liberalize and adjust and accommodate, you know, new groups and new social values, he's gonna look terrible.

He's gonna look like somebody who tried to turn back the clock to the 1950s.

And I think there's a compelling case for that.

But we'll have to see.

We won't be around to make the final judgment, but we'll see what happens.

- And also, people will have to decide in not political position, just it's a fact, people will have to decide when United States Congress, the House of Representatives, the complexion of it looks very different because congressional districts will look very different and there'll be fewer African Americans, minority members of Congress.

People have to decide whether they think that was the right thing or not.

And Sam Alito played a big role in that as well.

To Peter Canellos, one thing I do know is you've written a wonderful book and people should go out and get it.

I cannot thank you enough for joining us.

Thank you, Peter.

- Thank you so much, Steve.

I appreciate it.

- I'm Steve Adubato, that is a great author.

See you next time.

- [Narrator] One-On-One with Steve Adubato is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Funding has been provided by The New Jersey Education Association.

NJ Transit.

PSEG Foundation.

New Jersey Sharing Network.

The Burke Foundation The Fund for New Jersey.

RWJBarnabas Health.

Learn More at RWJBH.org.

NJM Insurance Group.

And by IBEW Local 102.

Promotional support provided by NJ.Com.

And by BestofNJ.com.

- NJM Insurance Group has been serving New Jersey businesses for over a century.

As part of the Garden State, we help companies keep their vehicles on the road, employees on the job and projects on track, working to protect employees from illness and injury, to keep goods and services moving across the state.

We're proud to be part of New Jersey.

NJM, we've got New Jersey covered.