The leak rocked the Supreme Court and its tradition of secrecy that includes unpublished opinions. After a month-long hearing, Supreme Court Marshal Gail Curley said in January that the court could not determine with certainty “the identity of any individual who disclosed the document or how the draft opinion ended up in politics.”
The news site published Alito’s draft opinion nearly a year ago.
In an April 13 interview with a Wall Street Journal editorial editor and a private attorney active in conservative causes, Alito acknowledged that there was insufficient evidence to publicly accuse Curley of leaking his draft opinion. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
“I personally have a pretty good idea of who is responsible, but that’s different from the level of evidence needed to name someone,” Alito said, according to the story. Published online Friday. He asserted that the leak was “part of a containment effort.” Tops Draft … from the decision of the court. It was used for those six weeks by outsiders – as part of a campaign to try to intimidate the court.
Alito theorized that the draft was leaked by someone entitled to lock in the five votes needed for overturning. Ro “Annoying me.”
“Look, this has made us a target for assassination,” Alito told his interviewers. “Would I do it by myself? Would all five of us have done it? It’s so unbelievable.”
Alito made similar statements last fall at an event at the conservative Heritage Foundation. In an interview with the Journal last June, Judge Brett M. Alito noted that an armed man was arrested outside the Cavanagh home. The man has pleaded not guilty to a charge of attempted murder and is awaiting trial.
“It is rational to believe that people can stop the decision Tops By killing one of us,” Alito said James TarantoEditorial features for the journal are author and David B. Rivkin Jr., Advocate active in conservative causes. Rivkin writes frequently for the Journal’s opinion pages, and helped lead a legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act.
Alito added, “We don’t feel physically unsafe because we have a lot of security now.” He said he was “basically driven in a tank, and I really don’t go anywhere alone without the tank and members of my police force.”
Alito declined to answer questions about Justice Clarence Thomas, the interviewers wrote. He also bought Justice’s childhood home, where his mother continues to live, after ProPublica reported that Thomas accepted lavish vacations, private jet travel and gifts from his billionaire friend and Republican donor Harlan Crowe. Thomas does not report expenses on his disclosure forms, which provide transparency about potential ethical conflicts.
Without commenting on Thomas, Alito said he believes reports of ethics violations by judges are attempts to damage the court’s credibility, with conservatives firmly in control. “We are being beaten every day, I think in many cases very unfairly. No one, practically no one is protecting us,” he said.
“And then our attackers say, ‘Look how unpopular they are. Look how low their approval ratings have gone,'” Alito said. “Well, yeah, what do you expect when you’re — day in and day out, ‘They’re illegal. They’re doing all kinds of immoral things. They’re doing this, they’re doing that?’
A The NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll was released Wednesday It shows that 37 percent of Americans have “a great deal” or “a lot” of confidence in the Supreme Court, up from 59 percent who said they had confidence in the court in 2018.
“If they see that what we’re doing is not following the Constitution and the laws,” Alito said, the public should question the fairness of the court.
But he supported the court’s willingness to overrule legal precedents Some cases like Ro and the court’s follow-up decision Casey v. Planned Parenthood“So very wrong, so clearly wrong, that this is a very strong factor in favor of overruling them.”
Alito’s critics charge that he denied such comments in his confirmation hearings nearly 30 years ago.
“Roe v. Wade is an important Supreme Court precedent. It was decided in 1973, so it’s been on the books for a long time,” he said at his Senate hearing. “It’s a paradigm that’s been on the books for decades now. It’s been challenged. It’s been reaffirmed.
When pressed at the time, Alito said it was clear there would be challenges to the law, and that it was wrong for a judge to say, “I’m not even going to listen to you. I have made up my mind on this issue.”
Still, he wrote that the decision was overturned Ro Last spring, some critics said his testimony was misleading.
