Sam Alito Defenders Explain How Private Air Travel & $1000 Wine Are JUST LIKE Free Cookies And Plastic Easter Eggs
Deeply, deeply unserious people.
(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
After ProPublica convection roasted Sam Alito last week, tying him to an all-expense paid luxury getaway where he flew on billionaire Paul Singer’s private jet without disclosing any of it or recusing himself when Singer’s personal crusade against the government of Argentina reached the Supreme Court, Alito, for his part, tried to get out ahead of the publication’s damning report with a pre-rebuttal that somehow managed to make him look more guilty.
Now his Federalist Society cronies have swooped in to his defense on social media. It’s… not inspiring a lot of confidence.
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That’s Professor Nicole Garnett of Notre Dame Law calling out ProPublica’s obsession with Supreme Court ethics by comparing it to her buying plastic eggs for Amy Coney Barrett’s Easter Egg hunt.
Which is stupid.
As Jay Willis of Balls & Strikes noted “Law students, if your professor tries to tell you that credible allegations of judicial corruption are the same as a dumb joke about an Easter egg hunt, you should not take anything they say seriously ever again.”
True. But, importantly, it’s stupid on many levels!
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Half of the ethical issue is Alito’s failure to disclose the gifts, which is an obligation he had as a sitting justice and not one ACB had as a law professor. It does not make the analogy less stupid, but it’s a significant distinction.
More to the point, Sam Alito is accused of getting a luxury gift from Paul Singer and then hearing a case and ruling in favor of… Paul Singer. The idea that an amicus brief co-author raises the same ethical concern as the actual interested party is a real “apples and Volkswagens” level comparison.
But Professor Garnett already had beef with Pro Publica for blowing the lid off her former boss Clarence Thomas. As ethical defenses from former Thomas clerks go… this still might not be the worst.
No, it is definitely dumber.
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Professor Adler of Case Western entered the chat to belittle Senator Sheldon Whitehouse for refusing to let “multiple Supreme Court justices implicated in massive ethical lapses” slide under the rug.
See! It’s all a joke! Isn’t it just nutty that anyone would be concerned that wealthy litigants get to wine and dine and fly justices around the world while they dodge a decades-old federal disclosure law to cover it up?
For what it’s worth:
This is what gives her shame.
But you might be wondering what got FedSoc’s Catskills routine making jokes about plastic eggs to begin with. Well, here’s the Tweet that inspired Garnett:
Honestly, when the moment calls for disingenuous analysis, you want Ted Frank on that wall.
Frank, for the uninitiated, postures himself as a defender of vulnerable class members when his firm objects to class action attorney fees, as opposed to acknowledging that it’s just a ploy to build caselaw that makes class action work less attractive to plaintiff-side firms. This strategy then aides right-wing business leaders avoid repercussions for small but widespread harms. So it’s nice to see him come right out and stand up for the conservative billionaires he really cares about!
As an aside, we got accused of letting Frank “live rent-free” in our heads, and if he’s living rent-free up there, it’s only because he’s squatting without us noticing since we’ve only had occasion to pay attention to him twice in the last five years.
This is a weird defense even as bad defenses go. At least Garnett offered an example of something someone actually gave a (future) justice. Frank couldn’t even be bothered to conjure up anything as plausible as an Easter Egg hunt. Instead he compared $1000 wine to… enjoying a benefit universally awarded to drivers and getting cookies from a company with a name that sounds like a litigant?
Getting a discount available to everyone is not favoritism. This is the literal plot of the State Farm Patrick Price commercials!
Frank spent a lot of time typing this. As a Blue Checkmark because he’s the poster child for the sort of person who would pay for Twitter he gets to write longer Tweets and yet somewhere along the line as his thumbs furiously conveyed this drivel from his brain to the digital page he never stopped to think, “maybe I should at least come up with a frivolous analogy that makes sense.”
In any event, the real takeaway from these messages is that even the Federalist Society die-hards have reached a breaking point.
Pro Publica are obsessed! Senator “Whiteboard” is crazy! Flying a sitting justice to a luxury retreat is like doing all your shopping on Prime Days! They’ve bypassed even the facially bad substantive arguments Alito offered in his op-Ed to wish away the language of disclosure laws and the customary — as the Supreme Court notably has no binding ethical code — recusal standards. It’s just distraction and mockery left as the last refuge of the scoundrel’s defenders.
But it’s a strategy that’s worked for Trump for years, so they know their audience.
Justice Samuel Alito Took Luxury Fishing Vacation With GOP Billionaire Who Later Had Cases Before the Court [Pro Publica]
Justice Samuel Alito: ProPublica Misleads Its Readers [WSJ]
Earlier: Sam Alito Laments It’s Getting So You Can’t Take All-Expense Paid Luxury Vacations Funded By Billionaires Anymore
Judge Ho Blows Off Clarence Thomas Taking $500K In Vacations Because Some Other Judges Own Stocks So… You Know… Something Something.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
