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The Wall Street Journal opinion pages just published another interview with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. I’ve covered Alito’s previous whiny musings from the safe space provided to him by the leading elite conservative outlet, and this latest offering contains the Republican-appointed jurist’s trademark mix of arrogance, self-pity and delusion.
One of the many parts that stands out is Alito’s stated concern that people might disobey his court’s rulings.
“If we’re viewed as illegitimate, then disregard of our decisions becomes more acceptable and more popular. So you can have a revival of the massive resistance that occurred in the South after Brown,” he’s quoted as saying in the piece published Friday, referring to the court’s 1954 school desegregation ruling, Brown v. Board of Education.
Put to the side, for a moment, the richness of Alito claiming the mantle of Brown, after he and his GOP colleagues just contorted the landmark ruling in the name of a colorblind Constitution to gut affirmative action.
The reality is that a Supreme Court opinion is being defied in real time in the South, in a case about race.
The reality is that a Supreme Court opinion is being defied in real time in the South, in a case about race. In the court’s June decision in Allen v. Milligan, the justices surprisingly, by a 5-4 margin, ruled against Alabama’s voting map that diluted Black voting power.
But when Alabama Republicans were forced to try again, they defied the court. Indeed, the president of the Legal Defense Fund, Janai Nelson, deemed it “an act of massive resistance to a Supreme Court order.”
Of course, Alito was on the short side of that 5-4 ruling. We’ll see how concerned he is about this resistance if the case returns to the justices.