Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution
By Mollie Hemingway
Basic Liberty, 352 pages, $32
Suffice to say, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is a conservative’s conservative.
Nominated to succeed Reagan-appointed Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, these Supreme Court nominations have long since evolved after the Reagan nomination of the conservative Robert Bork into battles royal, and Justice Alito has long since vindicated President George W. Bush’s desire to keep the conservative tradition on the Court alive and going.
Mollie Hemingway, the editor-in-chief of The Federalist, has done Alito’s time on the Court — and his admirers — a decided service in her biography Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution.
Right on the flyleaf of the book’s cover, it notes that Mollie’s book is “comprehensive” and “explains how his common sense and prosecutorial experience combined with fearless intellectual rigor has shaped the man and the jurist.”
I should say at the outset that while I am not a lawyer, as a member of the Reagan White House political staff, I was, along with colleagues, deeply involved in what became the massive and first-of-its-kind battle over a Supreme Court nominee. In that case, the Reagan nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Bork was a seriously qualified Court nominee and a decided conservative. The two factors together were exactly what terrified Bork’s left-wing opponents, and they launched a never-before-seen and decidedly brutal political campaign to defeat Bork. This included a very divisive first back in the day — campaign-style television commercials attacking Bork. With a massive lobbying effort to defeat him, a campaign so vicious that it became a verb: “Borking.” As in a judicial nominee was being “Borked” — so massively smeared as if in a political campaign that the nomination simply could not prevail. (RELATED: The Left’s Never-Ending War to Disqualify Justices)
Bork himself would later write in his memoirs:
The clash over my nomination was simply one battle in this long-running war for control of our legal culture. There may be legitimate differences about that nomination, but, in the larger war for control of the law, there are only two sides. Either the Constitution and statutes are law, which means that their principles are known and control judges, or they are malleable texts that judges may rewrite to see that particular groups or political causes win.
Suffice to say, not unlike Bork himself and other conservative jurists (like Alito’s colleague Justice Clarence Thomas or the late Justice Antonin Scalia), Justice Alito is a decided and quite open conservative.
Notably, Hemingway recounts the seemingly endless assaults on the Court that followed Bork’s nomination over the succeeding years. And notably, Hemingway details Alito’s decidedly brave move in voting to overturn the legendary Roe v. Wade decision that had tried to institutionalize abortion. That decision, Dobbs v. Jackson, was a decidedly landmark decision, with the decision’s majority opinion, as noted, drafted by Justice Alito.
To say that the reaction to the overturn of Roe was tumultuous is decidedly understated. And Hemingway, after detailing the craziness that surrounded the reaction to that decision and Alito’s role in overturning the decision, writes:
But testimonies to Alito’s character and intellect are inadequate to capture the quality of his conduct through this tumultuous period. In spite of political threats to the legitimacy of the Court — accompanied by very real threats to the justices’ own lives — Alito had quietly and consistently delivered justice while also anchoring the team through its most controversial decision in half a century.’
The heavens had fallen, and Alito had done his duty, unawed.
This superb biography of Alito, his life, judicial philosophy, and actions on the Court, goes on, in detail, to give a serious historical rendering of exactly the role Alito plays as a serious scholar and player on the Court.
When she ends this telling, Mollie notes:
When he attends functions in Washington, a city of inflated egos, Alito can be found in the corner, quietly talking to a few people. He does not need to be the center of attention. In a room where he is the most important person, he makes those he is having a conversation with feel comfortable. Polite and deferential, he does not draw people into his vortex as many powerful figures do. If someone else starts talking, he stops. He does not seek glory, status, or fame. Some people get energy from holding a glass of wine and having people come up and pay homage to them. Alito gets energy from reading a law review article.
…..
Alito is not a melancholy warrior, but he is not a happy one, either. He cares deeply about the law and getting the big issues correct, and he is affected by what the Court does…..
Mollie ends with this from her judicial subject, quoting from a speech he gave to the Federalist Society: “For all Americans, standing up for our Constitution and our freedom is work that lies ahead.”
To which a reader can only add an “Amen!” to that.
Without doubt, Mollie Hemingway’s biography of Justice Samuel Alito is a superb addition to the small library of books written over the decades that detail the lives and works of Supreme Court decisions and the Justices who wrote those decisions.
It is well done indeed.
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