Samuel Alito
Justice Samuel Alito is part of the right-wing faction of the U.S. Supreme Court responsible for rolling back Americans’ freedoms. He was nominated by President George W. Bush in 2005 and confirmed 58-42 to the nation’s highest court in 2006.
Leonard Leo aided the confirmations of all six of the right-wing justices on the Supreme Court, including Alito. Leo also has close ties to the Judicial Crisis Network, also known as the JCN and the Concord Fund, which supported the confirmation of Justice Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts shortly after it was launched after the 2004 election. Leo, the fundraiser who engineered the right-wing capture of the Supreme Court, steers the Federalist Society as co-chair of its board and was previously its executive vice president. Alito has participated in a range of Federalist Society events over the years, in addition to having other ties to the Leo network, such as to the Napa Institute (Leo is on the Napa Institute Legal Foundation’s board).
In mid-2024, the New York Times reported that in the weeks after the violent January 6th insurrection, the Alitos flew an upside-down American flag over their home. This banner has served as a symbol of support for the violent insurrectionists and the “Stop the Steal” agenda that falsely claimed Trump won the 2020 election. At the time the Supreme Court was considering whether or not to take up a 2020 election challenge, which Alito voted to hear. In 2024, news broke that another symbol of the insurrection was flown over Sam Alito’s second home on the Jersey Shore. According to the Times report, the Alitos flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag—which has been used to reflect “a religious strand of the ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign and for a push to remake American government in Christian terms”—at his New Jersey beach house in the summer of 2023. Leo also flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag at his Maine home.
In response to calls that he recuse himself from any January 6th cases based on the standards in the federal recusal statute, Alito sent letters to the Senate and House refusing to recuse himself in cases relating to Trump or the insurrection. He asserted “The two incidents you cite do not meet the conditions for recusal….” Although the federal judicial recusal statute requires a “justice [to] … disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” or “where he has a personal bias or prejudice concerning a party,” Alito continued to participate in cases involving Trump, including joining the ruling that invented immunity from criminal prosecution for Trump’s so-called “official acts” in Trump v. US.
He also attempted to shift the responsibility for the insurrection flags to his wife, Martha-Ann Alito, claiming she flew the flags over their homes, and he provided a false narrative for the reason an upside-down flag was flying over his home, making claims directly contradicted in a contemporaneous police report. His wife was later recorded by Lauren Windsor saying she hated seeing other Americans fly a rainbow flag in recognition of gay rights and said she fantasized about flying a flag emblazoned with the word “vergogna,” the Italian word for “shame.” Windsor also captured a recording of Justice Alito saying, when it comes to the political struggle over individual rights, ultimately “One side or the other is going to win.”
In 2023, ProPublica reported that, like his colleague Clarence Thomas, Alito failed to disclose luxury gifts received from billionaires who had business before the Court. For example, in July 2008, Alito went on a vacation at a luxury Alaska fishing lodge with hedge-fund billionaire and Republican mega-donor Paul Singer (who has repeatedly had business before the Court since). Leonard Leo organized this trip, invited Singer, and reportedly asked Singer if he and Alito could fly on the billionaire’s jet. Alito used the Wall Street Journal editorial page to claim his illegal failure to disclose a free $100,000 private jet trip by explaining that Singer, “allowed [him] to occupy what would have otherwise been an unoccupied seat on a private flight to Alaska.” Meanwhile, another multi-millionaire who staked JCN, Rob Arkley, underwrote the expense for the lodging for Alito’s trip.
In 2024, Alito did disclose the $900 concert tickets gifted to him by German billionaire Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, a socialite who runs in far right circles. Alito’s relationship with her is significant because it highlights his ties to a key player in a transnational theocratic coterie hostile to reproductive freedom and gay rights.
Notably, in 2022, Alito gave the keynote address at an event sponsored by the University of Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty Initiative in Rome. In his speech, Alito mocked international criticisms against the Dobbs decision he wrote and made light of the irreparable harm the ruling would cause women and their loved ones. He also used that platform to condemn secularism and the unreligious, suggesting instead that proselytization and state-sponsored indoctrination were necessary to the American social order. In that speech, Alito seems to suggest that the only way “we” can protect religious freedom and win the battle against secularism is by evangelizing. While Alito claims to support the religious pluralism of the Founders, his remarks in Rome suggest instead a commitment to “evangelizing the world” to his religion while making his views binding law on other Americans whether they share his beliefs or not.
Overturning Roe v. Wade and Limiting Contraception Access
Alito wrote the opinion for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade and eliminating federal constitutional protections for abortion in 2022. The strident claims in his opinion also call into question the Court’s landmark rulings in Griswold v. Connecticut (protecting access to contraception) and in Obergefell v. Hodges (protecting marriage equality for LGBTQ+ Americans to marry the person they love).
Alito’s opinion asserted the falsehood that abortion has always been a crime, citing the same medieval English jurist referenced in the amicus brief submitted by Robert P. George ( a Princeton Professor and Leonard Leo confidant). This historically inaccurate argument was echoed in dozens of amicus briefs submitted in support of Mississippi’s abortion restrictions and was also featured on the Federalist Society’s website months before the decision. Politico reported that 69% of amicus briefs filed in seven high-profile Supreme Court cases over the past two years were connected to Leo and his network. “The picture that emerges is of an exceedingly small universe of mostly Christian conservative activists developing and disseminating theories to change the nation’s legal and cultural landscape,” Politico wrote.
Alliance Defending Freedom’s (a Christian right-wing legal group Leo has praised as “formidable”) Erin Hawley–who is married to controversial U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO)— secretly helped write the bill and helped coordinate the amicus briefs filed in support of the abortion ban in Dobbs. Despite her name not appearing on any of the amicus briefs, analysis of Hawley’s commentary on Dobbs in the months leading up to the decision shows that the right-wing faction of the Supreme Court parroted many of her claims.
Before the Court made its devastating ruling on Dobbs, ushering in a regressive and dangerous chapter for the lives of American women, a copy of Alito’s opinion was leaked. According to the New York Times, years before the leaked Dobbs opinion draft, Alito leaked the result of the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby decision (weeks before it was publicly announced) to a right-wing operative plugged into an effort to use gifts to the Supreme Court Historical Society to gain access to Supreme Court justices in order to influence them–a scheme that seemingly worked. Alito wrote the opinion in that case, which declared that certain employers can block their employees’ access to birth control due to their corporation’s purported religious beliefs. The Times’ report suggested there was a coordinated effort by abortion access opponents that relied on wealthy donors to influence some justices on the Court, in order to “stiffen the resolve of the court’s conservatives in taking uncompromising stances that could eventually lead to a reversal of Roe.”
Despite his claims to the contrary during the hearing on his nomination to the Court, Alito has had deep personal hostility toward abortion access for decades. For example, as a circuit court judge, Alito wrote a dissent in the intermediate appellate court ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, that would have required women to alert their husbands before getting an abortion despite potential risks to their family. His position was rejected by the Supreme Court in an opinion upholding Roe that was crafted by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, whom he later replaced.
Inventing Presidential Immunity from Criminal Prosecution; and Effectively Pardoning Trump
Alito joined Chief Justice John Roberts’ 6-3 ruling that in effect pardoned Donald Trump for any crimes he committed as President that could be construed as official acts of the executive of the United States. A decision that compelled Justice Sotomayor to end her dissenting opinion with the chilling words, “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.” While this edict in theory allows Trump to be prosecuted for activities not cloaked as “official acts,” it bars the use of any evidence of his words or deeds related to official acts. It ignores U.S. law since our nation’s founding that no person is above the law, including the president. It also ignores the language of the Constitution, which grants no such immunity and specifies that any official can be impeached for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” It also disregards the Constitution’s oath of office, which requires that a President “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
Prospectively, this reckless ruling could potentially give license to a future president to use the powers of chief executive and commander-in-chief, including the use of emergency declarations, to dramatically alter the law and the stabilizing norms central to American democracy, our economy, and our way of life without fear of criminal prosecution.
Related cases: Fischer v. United States (6-3 ruling limiting the use of obstruction charges against those involved in the violent Jan. 6th insurrection); Trump v. Anderson (5-4 edict restoring Trump to the Colorado ballot despite the 14th Amendment’s bar on insurrectionists holding office.)
Limiting the Voting Rights Act; Allowing Partisanship to Mask Racist Voting Map Drawing
Alito wrote the opinion for a 6-3 ruling further limiting the power of the Voting Rights Act. In Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, the right-wing faction dominating the court overturned decades of precedent protecting against racial gerrymandering. In the very first paragraph of Alito’s opinion he wrote, “This, as far as the Federal Constitution is concerned, a legislature may pursue partisan ends when it engages in redistricting.” In other words, Alito’s opinion permits voting maps to be drawn along political party lines, even if those maps exceedingly benefit white voters and limit the representation rights of voters of color. The ruling allowed a voting map that had bleached more than 30,000 Black residents out of their traditional congressional district based on the claim by the Republican-dominated South Carolina legislature that, even though the maps had a profoundly disparate impact on Black American voters, such maps could not be held unconstitutional or in violation of the Voting Rights Act so long as there were a partisan rationale for the map drawing. This ruling overturned the findings by the lower courts that the map was an illegal racial gerrymander, and it joins a series of rulings by the Roberts Court degrading the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.
As Justice Kagan suggested based on the right-wing faction’s majority opinion that “when it comes to suppressing minority influence, the Supreme Court majority sends the message of ‘Go right ahead.” Vox went so far as to describe this decision as a “love letter to gerrymandering” and expressed the view that “Thanks to an opinion by Sam Alito, rigged maps now enjoy the Supreme Court’s unambiguous support.”