The Untold Story Behind Justice Samuel Alito’s Worldview

The U.S.

Supreme Court has become one of the most powerful and polarizing institutions in American life.

From abortion and presidential power to guns, its decisions have reshaped the country.

But today's conservative majority did not emerge overnight.

According to veteran legal journalist Peter Canellos, it is the culmination of a decades-long movement that transformed the federal judiciary.

Michelle Martin spoke with Canellos about his new book, Revenge for the '60s, and what this year's Supreme Court term reveals about the court today.

Thanks, Bianna.

Peter Canellos, thank you so much for talking with us.

Thank you, Michelle.

The Supreme Court just wrapped up another consequential term.

Your new book, Revenge for the '60s, revenge for the '60s, that's important, Sam Alito and the triumph of the conservative legal movement examines the forces that shaped today's courts.

Before we get into the book, how would you sum up this term?

Was there a through line for you as a person who's been watching the court for a long time?

Well, this was the term where we were going to find out if the conservative justices were going to truly be a bulwark against President Trump's desires to stretch his executive authority.

What I would, I mean, I think it's fine to say his dictatorial ambitions, he's used that term himself.

And it's always been a question, would the conservatives, justices, who came from a very different place, you know, they are a conservative influence on our society, but they're not the same as MAGA, would they rein in Trump?

And I think the answer was a partial yes on the birthright citizenship case on tariffs.

In a few instances, they did.

But Sam Alito did not.

And Sam Alito kind of led a dissenting opposition on that score that sets him up as kind of the pro-MAGA justice in a way.

So I feel like we got an indication that the conservative justices are willing to be tough on Trump, but it's sort of going to be deferred, I think, until the next term and perhaps even the term after that to see just how much of a bulwark against Trump they will be.

You know, your book is so interesting because it's not a conventional biography.

Most biographies kind of weave in the significant events of the person being profiled's life, but the person is foregrounded.

Your book is kind of the opposite because you use the life and career of Justice Alito to tell the story of the movement that shaped him, which is which is fascinating.

You actually start out with the legal theory that Sam Alito is most identified with, which is originalism.

You say he wasn't the first self-described originalist to join the Supreme Court, but he was the most emblematic.

First of all, what is originalism?

And then, of course, I'm going to ask you to tell me, why is he the one that helps us understand what it means?

Yeah, well, I think that, you know, your question is generated because my impetus for writing the book was to write about the rise of the conservative legal movement.

The conservative legal movement in 40 years has really taken over our justice system.

You know, there's a six to three majority on the Supreme Court.

There's close to a majority among all federal judges.

When you think of all of the landmark changes of the last few years in affirmative action, in voting rights, in abortion, in the EPA and the ability of independent agencies to regulate the economy, this is a sea change in American lives.

And it did not come about because the American people changed their minds, right?

The poll numbers are almost the same as they were 40 years ago.

And all of those issues, it's the point that's changed.

And this has been a very successful, very disciplined movement that has succeeded in doing something we've never seen before in our history, to have an actual movement come in and take over.

So the reason that I say, Sam Bolita was not the first originalist, but he's the first to come out of this pipeline, is that 40 and 50 years ago, as this movement was getting started, one of the goals was to create a sort of regular pipeline of reliable conservatives.

You may remember that a lot of the Republican appointees had been accused of sort of going native in Washington and becoming liberals and things like that.

And so the goal of this movement, whether it came through the Federalist Society, but also through Ed Meese's term as Attorney General, and many of the leaders, Leonard Leo, who has, you know, driven this movement.

You know, the goal was to take people when they are young, as far as young as law students, you know, have them become believers in a sort of originalist philosophy, which has an intellectual appeal, and came out of it, and then qualify them at a very early age and put them on a path that can lead them to the Supreme Court.

So let's go back to this whole question of originalism.

How did originalism start?

Yeah, well, I think, I mean, one aspect of the revenge for the '60s was conservative anger at the Warren court.

Now, the Warren court was not a group of all self-described liberals who were part of a movement who were appointed to bring about a certain result.

They were, you know, white men until Thurgood Marshall joined, and they had come up in the court, majority of them Republican appointees, you know, from all these different walks of life.

But they sort of coalesced at a moment of great social change, and they liberalized the law in a lot of ways, starting with Brown v. Board of Education, the desegregation case in 1954, and even though Chief Justice Warren had retired by that time, it sort of ended in 1973 with Roe v. Wade.

But during that 19-year period, there were tremendous liberalizations in things like freedom from intrusive police searches and the Miranda warnings and separation of church and state.

All of these things moved to the left.

And many conservatives felt, with some degree of conviction, that the court was sort of taking on this central role in American life.

And these unelected judges were pushing things to the left.

So part of their movement was, we need to set some boundaries around the court and the law.

And that's what originalism came in.

It's like, we should not be looking at the Constitution as a living document the way some liberals do.

And we should not be looking at these open-ended provisions like the liberty language of the 14th Amendment, which was where Roe v. Wade was sort of found.

We should be thinking more about the original intent or the original meaning of the Constitution and setting some real boundaries in terms of reading the text of the Constitution and being rigorous about what these provisions were meant to say and what they were not meant to say.

I think that's where originalism came out.

- So tell me about Sam Alito.

Tell us a little bit about his background and why was he attracted to originalism?

- Well, I mean, I think that Sam Alito is emblematic of the larger group of people that have been driving the conservative legal movement.

And when you trace it all back, a disproportionate number of them come from the great wave of European immigration that occurred in the 20th century.

These were not rich people generally.

They were people who went to public school education.

They were taught the greatness of the Declaration of Independence, the greatness of the Constitution.

If you're a kid like San Bolito, whose parents and grandparents were Italian immigrants and had faced a fair amount of discrimination and poverty and deprivation, what told him, you know, they did it all for him so that he would be able to live up to his full potential as an American.

And then you have the, add to that the patriotism of the Cold War, add to that the regular churchgoing moral values of the Catholic Church.

And it became in his mind this kind of American tradition that he honors and that he wants to see enforced under the law.

When he was 18, he was the valedictorian of his high school.

He was the head of the student council.

He was the leader of the editor of the college newspaper, the steward of the high school newspaper.

But everything started to change, right?

At that moment, that's when you had the Martin Luther King riots in Trenton, a particularly violent set of riots right after the assassination of Dr.

King, in which a whole swath of Trenton was destroyed, in which a young activist, actually a peacemaking activist, was killed by police.

It was a very traumatic, traumatic kind of event.

And you see in the very last issue that he was the editor of, of the college newspaper, a sort of cry from the heart editorial, decrying the anarchy.

Going to Princeton, he felt very successful, but it was a time of great turbulence, right?

He was the last all-male class to enter Princeton.

And by sophomore year, when women arrived, it was the social life of campus changing.

Conversations were about things like contraception, abortion, you know, couples of premarital sex.

And he was forced to defend in these sort of dorm room bull sessions, you know, his conservative values, his Catholic-based conservative values.

And, you know, people say that was discomforting for him.

His classmates In addition, he was in ROTC.

He was one of 27 students in the Army ROTC.

At a time when the Nixon administration invaded Cambodia, and this was a dramatic escalation, seen as an escalation of the fighting in Vietnam, there was a massive student demonstration, a massive student strike.

Exams were canceled.

And for the first time, people said they saw Alito offering political opinion.

And he was upset.

He felt injured that exams were canceled because he had studied up and he was going to get straight A's in his mind, and that's what he needed to do to get ahead.

And here are the faculty and students canceling and saying there's a larger issue here.

So I think some sense of needing to rein in these forces of social change came out of that era.

I also think for Alito and for other people, you know, keep in mind, these are the meritocrats.

These are the people carrying with them the hopes and dreams of their parents and grandparents.

And they saw, I think, for the first time that they were at odds with their generation.

So, one of the ways that people may associate Sam Alito with this conservative legal movement is his opinion in the Dobbs case.

This wasn't just a decision of one case.

This was, as you argue, the culmination of this 50-year project.

So, could you just talk about that decision and talk about how it-why it's so important to the argument you're making about the sort of the trajectory of the conservative legal movement.

Yes.

Well, first of all, I mean, you can trace the roots of that decision back to his time in college and law school.

At Princeton, his great mentor was a professor named Walter Murphy, whose specialty was the internal politics of the Supreme Court.

You know, he literally is a man who studied how certain justices on the Supreme Court were able to get their colleagues to coalesce around certain views.

And it was very instructive, I think, for Alito, because it said that being on the Supreme Court isn't just a matter of voting "A" or "Nay," you know, it's a matter of persuading other people to your side.

And that's what happened in Dobbs.

So when you look at the Dobbs decision, the first third of the Dobbs decision is him talking about the great moral divide of abortion and persuading it's a moral issue and things like that.

I think that that was aimed at separating abortion from some things that maybe one of those justices, and keep in mind it was a 5-4 decision because Roberts was not on board with that.

Maybe one of those conservatives was saying to him, "Look, we don't want to set a precedent that's going to get like contraception overturned or interracial marriages overturned or we're going to get the same-sex marriage case overturned."

And Alito was saying, "No, we can make a moralistic case that abortion is unique.

Abortion has stands alone as this great divide."

When Roe v. Wade came down, he was a first-year student, and he says, "From day one, Roe v. Wade was an offense to the Constitution.

It was wrong, wrong, wrong right from the start."

And that obviously was aimed at another one of the conservative justices probably who was saying, "Well, you know, I listened to Chief Justice Roberts here, and Chief Justice Roberts says we shouldn't be overturning a 50-year precedent just because we think it's wrong we decide it."

You know, the proper posture is to stand by the decision if it's now become sort of ingrained in society and kind of move on.

And Alito was like, no, you know, we can overturn this if it was absolutely wrong from the start, as people would say, maybe Plessy v. Ferguson was wrong from the start.

So that's what the middle part of that decision is.

So when you say it's a culmination, and I say that it's a culmination of a 50-year project, I think that there was a time, particularly right after the Robert Bork defeat in 1987, when there was a fusion between the legal critics of Roe v. Wade and the moral critics of abortion.

You know, the religious right, the pro-life movement.

They cottoned on to the idea that the conservative jurists were skeptical of Roe v. Wade, and they provided a lot of the political impetus that kept Republican presidents like George W. Bush dedicated to appointing these proven conservatives onto the bench.

And to some extent, I mean, we all lived through that period, right?

Proven conservative tended to mean skeptic of Roe v. Wade.

It was never absolutely clear that they were going to be able to overturn Roe v. Wade.

But Alito carried the day.

He wrote the opinion.

It was a landmark opinion.

It shows in my mind first how influential Sam Alito is in our lives and how central he is to our lives right now if you think of how influential that case was.

And you also think of it in terms of all of the history that went behind it.

You know, when he quotes John Hardy Lee in the first couple of paragraphs of that decision, he's remembering himself as a 23-year-old first-year law student, you know, listening to John Hardy Lee make that argument at Yale.

Does the justice have an awareness of the fact that people, that many people now view him as the radical?

The concept now is that many people see Justice Alito as a political actor, as a partisan actor, and not as a sort of an independent jurist, you know, sort of balancing values, balancing-you understand, being that sort of balancing mechanism that many people feel the Constitution intended?

I think that he's aware of the critique, but he probably dismisses it a little bit too easily.

I think that in his mind, that critique, you know, there have been actual incidents like his wife flying the flags over their house that were pro-Trump flags at a time when he was considering Trump cases and things like that.

I think he analogizes those kinds of critiques to partisan attacks on him.

That, you know, the polarization that has happened in our politics has definitely bled over onto the court.

And he, in many of his public utterances, in many of his questions on the court, has shown a sense of that tit-for-tat kind of partisanship.

He had an exchange of opinions with Sonia Sotomayor, literally when they were delivering opinions just this last term.

It was a very kind of, "I represent one side, you represent the other side" kind of viewpoint.

And I think it's unfortunate.

The other thing is that his clerks are very, very conservative.

You know, he has chosen his clerks from almost entirely people who clerked for Republican-appointed circuit judges.

And so they are kind of an echo chamber for him.

And he's a shy person.

He's not somebody who's out there in the world.

He's not somebody who's interacting with a lot of people who are likely to have different viewpoints.

I think he's sort of scared.

Did your view of Justice Alito change over the course of reporting this book?

It did.

And it changed in two separate ways, one positive and one negative.

The positive one was when you go back and you learn about him and his upbringing, and things do make sense.

There was an earnest young man in there somewhere.

There was somebody who was polite and kind of played by the rules as they saw the rules.

Somebody who's loyal to his family, somebody who believes in his own ethnic group and feels their injuries very closely.

After he got on the Supreme Court, after the confirmation hearing, and it was a confirmation hearing at which Alito himself repeatedly emphasized the importance of a judge not having an agenda.

There's a quote on the wall of the George W. Bush Presidential Library from Alito saying, "A judge cannot have an agenda.

The judge's responsibility, and it is a solemn responsibility, is to the rule of law and to coming up with a correct outcome.

That is all a judge should do."

I mean, Alito repeatedly made those kinds of statements during his confirmation process, and then has emerged as a very controversial justice, sometimes expressing anger, sometimes going outside of the courtroom to offer opinions at his Federalist Society speeches, sometimes taking on his colleagues on the bench and others, he's become an actor.

And there's a contradiction there, and we can spin it out in many different ways.

There are legalistic ways to describe it, there are political ways to describe it, but he has become an actor on the American stage.

And he started off by temperament, by personality, and by his own statements as saying he would not do that.

So in that way, my opinion for him has become more critical.

In terms of looking at where he came from and the sincerity of his early years, it became more positive.

Peter Canellos, thank you so much for talking with me.

Thank you so much, Michel.

It was a pleasure.