[Amid heavy security, Alito was joined by three of his accomplices
- Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh - at the Federalist Societys 40th
anniversary gala, where their sordid work holding back the tides of
change and time was applauded.]
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BARBARIANS AT THE GATE: THE APPEARANCES ARE AWFUL  
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Abby Zimet
November 21, 2022
Common Dreams
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_ Amid heavy security, Alito was joined by three of his accomplices -
Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh - at the Federalist Society's 40th
anniversary gala, where their sordid work holding back the tides of
change and time was applauded. _

Pro-choice protesters came out in New York City to support abortion
rights in May, after Alito's horrifiying ruling in Dobbs leaked. Cut
off on the right, a woman carries a sign for a "Primal Scream
Station." , Pablo Monsalve/VIEWpress

 

TAKING A BREAK FROM his busy schedule of stripping half the American
populace of bodily autonomy, Justice Samuel Alito, the smug, sneering,
imperious face of a fundamentalist SCOTUS supermajority "redefining
the Constitutional landscape, and not to Americans' liking," got a
standing ovation
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last week from the swanky zealots of the Federalist Society who in
large part made it possible - thus proving again, despite Barack's
best intentions, we are not_ really _all one country. There is no
fouler proof of our divisions than the six, Catholic, extremist
justices who now make up the majority of the Supreme Court - though
the presidents who chose them have lost 7 of the last 8 popular votes
- and who are resolutely driving the country's laws "sharply to the
right" [[link removed]]
of mainstream public opinion. Alito, of course, wrote the opinion
overturning Roe v Wade, though he had to stoop to misquoting
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a 12-century Christian crank in his abject effort to justify revoking
a right that two-thirds of the country supports. Amid heavy security,
he was joined
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three of his accomplices - Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh - at the
Federalist Society's 40th anniversary gala, where 2,000 aging,
fearful, sectarian dinosaurs in tuxes and ball gowns applauded their
sordid work holding back the tides of change and time. Roberts had
hedged
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Dobbs, calling the ruling "a jolt to the legal system." Only Clarence
Thomas of the Hard-Core Four stayed home, likely plotting the next
coup with his lovely "terrorist-in-pearls" wife Ginni, God love 'em
both 'cause who else would?

Founded in 1982 by Yale Law School students to provide a voice for
conservatives on the mostly liberal campus, the Federalist Society,
now with chapters at 200 law schools, has long, laughably billed
itself as non-partisan; because denial is the right's super-power, the
Society dismisses the notion they have "captured" the federal
judiciary. But over time, and especially during the Orange Reign, it
grew into a sort of "farm team" for extremist federal judges, with
Trump outsourcing his selection of judicial nominees to them and they,
in turn, literally handing him lists of those ,who would advance their
agenda. "We're going to have great judges, conservative, all picked by
the Federalist Society," he obliviously boasted
[[link removed]]in
2016, and so they were. Over half his judicial nominees came from the
Society, 15 of his appeals court judges spoke at the conference, and
their "well-oiled machine" ultimately, lethally gave him three SCOTUS
picks, more than any modern president - Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett,
all members of the Society. The invidious Barrett was cheered when she
spoke; she said she had "benefitted immensely" from her ties to the
Society, and it was "really nice to have a lot of noise made not by
protesters outside my house." Leonard Leo, mastermind of the group's
grip on judicial selections, also got a standing ovation when he told
the crowd, “Our movement has grown by leaps and bounds, and so has
our impact." "And boy, is your work needed today,” said nobody ever.
No, wait. Alito said it.

That impact, of course, goes far beyond abortion access. After
mid-terms, many noted
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Federalist-packed SCOTUS had "helped the GOP gerrymander its way" into
control of the House, thanks to a 2019 SCOTUS ruling rejecting claims
GOP maps in Louisiana and Alabama constituted racial gerrymandering
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that diluted black votes. The maps stayed; in this election, the GOP
won five of its six races in Louisiana, and six of its seven in
Alabama, leading
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one sage called, "The House that Alito built." The Federalist gala was
held before all the votes had been tallied, but still members were
palpably grateful
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all Alito and his henchmen (and woman) had done. The crowd cheered
when one speaker crowed "the Dobbs decision will be forever an
indelible part of Justice Alito's legacy." They rose to their feet,
turned to their hero, and stood triumphantly clapping after former
Michigan Supreme Court justice Stephen Markman said, "I do not know of
any decision on any court by any judge of which that judge could be
more proud," never mind all four perps lied in their confirmation
hearings that they considered Roe settled law - Alito said he was "a
believer in precedents" - and their ruling obliterated all their
self-righteous pretense of caring about morality, legal principle, the
Constitution or anything other than furthering the fundamentalist GOP
agenda they were fast-tracked onto the court to boost. But no, said
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aggrieved Barrett, they are "not a bunch of partisan hacks." As to
their very presence at the Federalist fete, said one ethics expert,
"The appearances are awful."

Equally awful, and unsurprising, is the key role of Alito, the "Patron
Saint of Persecution Complexes," an "angry man"
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known to have only two modes: "sneering defiance
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and "bleating indignation
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Alito inhabits a world where white Christian men are under siege,
anyone criticizing
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beliefs is "bullying the court" or making him and his colleagues
"targets for assassination," a black pastor who spoke up for his
rights "threatened a race riot," he himself is free to play a rude,
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contemptuous, "nakedly unjudicial" buffoon
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in response to female colleagues, and the state's most vital task is
punitive; in 2016, when SCOTUS rejected Florida's death penalty, only
Alito dissented. [[link removed]] So, a
grotesque human being who likely kicks puppies in his free time, and
who in a 1985 job application for Reagan's Justice Department
pointedly declared, "I personally believe very strongly the
Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion," though, again,
the Constitution doesn't mention
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it. In a rabid 2020 speech
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the Federalist Society blasted
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"befitting a Trump rally," Alito raged about the threats posed by
liberals - same-sex marriage and cakes for them, gun control
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religious liberty as "second-tier" rights, COVID's "previously
unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty" - and, oof, quoted
Dylan: "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there." Most offensive is
a brazen, disingenuous arrogance, from proclaiming, "Congress has no
right to interfere with (our) work" to dismissing the impact of his
Dobbs ruling on women. "We do not pretend to know" how they will
respond, he intones, but regardless, we can't "let that knowledge
influence our decision." Aka, fuck 'em. 

Thus spoke a guy holding lifelong, unimaginable, unaccountable power
that protects him from the consequences of his actions, no matter how
devastating. The history of that power goes back to 1925, writes
[[link removed]]Linda
Greenhouse, when Congress gave the Court the power to select cases it
wanted to decide, thus transforming it from a "solver of disputes" to
a creator of laws shaping both its own and the country's agenda - now,
toward an agenda far to the right of most Americans. For the right,
Dobbs is the product of a political project
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goes back decades whose "one common aspiration (was) the capture of
the Supreme Court" - and with it, the reversal of Roe. In a country
where support for abortion rights has only grown over time, she notes,
"Getting the Court was not simply the obvious choice; it was the only
choice." Now, she writes, "The justices who make up the majority have
nothing in their way - that is the nature of a supermajority. (They),
or more accurately the forces that propelled them to the Court, have
been waiting a long time for this moment." The Dobbs decision, says
[[link removed]]one Court
scholar, "may be the most legitimacy-threatening decision since the
1930s." Along with other liberal judges, Justice Elena Kagan likewise
argues
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right-wing majority has broken the Court's historical bond with the
public and "is abusing its power...they undermine their legitimacy
when they stray into places where they're imposing their own personal
preferences." "The Court has great power," she says, "but it seems to
have lost any sense of its great responsibility."

And so we fight back. With Congressional action: Having arduously
negotiated bipartisan
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support, Democrats shepherded
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through a Respect for Marriage Act
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protect same-sex and interracial marriage under federal law, and yes
we should recognize the insanity of a SCOTUS so extreme that Congress
must act to protect interracial marriage from it even as one justice
they're protecting it from is in an interracial marriage. Clear? We
can still use the courts, sometimes. Affriming an appeals court
ruling, the Supreme Court refused
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halt a Jan. 6 subpoena for Arizona's GOP chair Kelli Ward's phone
records to see if she'd been talking with insurrection fan-girl Ginni
Thomas: "What an awkward coincidence
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- they should invent a phrase for that, something like 'conflict of
interest.'" (The only dissents: Thomas and Alito.) And a judge in
Georgia struck down
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the state's six-week abortion ban in a fiery decision trashing a
"frothy" Dobbs ruling that "does not retroactively revoke the force or
legitimacy of the decisions it overruled." Dobbs' authority "flows not
from some mystical higher wisdom" or "its special insight into
historical 'facts'” but from "basic math." Justice Thurgood
Marshall: "Power
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reason, is the currency of this new Court's decisionmaking." Still,
warns
[[link removed]]Elie
Mystal, no illusions about "who these people are...They are trying to
usher in a fundamentalist Christian theocracy and force the rest of us
to live in it," and they will gladly destroy a federal law protecting
abortion rights unless the political winds are blowing hard enough
against them to hurt the GOP - or provoke an expanded Court. To make
that political will known, stay loud. Our fave signs from protests:
"Abort the Patriarchy" and "Ruth Sent Us." Per Raymond Carver's "A
Small, Good Thing": She's not here to see this.

==

ABBY ZIMET [[link removed]] has
written CD's _FURTHER [[link removed]] _column
since 2008. A longtime, award-winning journalist, she moved to the
Maine woods in the early 70s, where she spent a dozen years building a
house, hauling water and writing before moving to Portland. Having
come of political age during the Vietnam War, she has long been
involved in women's, labor, anti-war, social justice and refugee
rights issues. Email: [email protected]

===

* The Federalist Society; Supreme Court Justices; Dobbs decision;
Samuel Alito;
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