Meet The Justice Reshaping The Supreme Court And Restoring The Constitution

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Visit your nearby Lowe's on Dickerson Pike in Nashville. And we are back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, Senior Elections correspondent at the Federalist and your experience Sherpa on today's quest for knowledge. As always, you can email the show at Radio at thefederalist.com. Follow us on X at FBRLST. Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast and, of course, to the premium version of our website as well.

Our guest today, I am delighted to say, is one of the all-time great Hemingways, Molly Hemingway, the Federalist Editor-in-Chief, Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College, Fox News contributor. You see her there all the time. as she notes on her ex account, a very smart woman respected by everyone. Well, certainly respected by people who respect journalism, that is for sure. Molly's New York Times bestselling book, Samuel Alito, the justice who reshaped the Supreme Court and restored the Constitution, is an in-depth, fascinating study of a practical originalist, as Molly notes in the book, Associate Samuel Alito Samuel Alito.

Thank you so much for being with us here on this edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. Well, it's great being here. I think it's funny that I have to write a book in order to appear on the Federalist Radio Hour. You have a standing invitation. Any time. You know, I've said that to like three people. One of them wrote a gushing and understandably so review of your book. And that is the great senator from Utah.

and then Chip Roy. I always enjoy the conversations with him. And there's one other guy. He's a congressman who is highly, highly quotable and always fun just to sit back and listen to.

And of course, that is Tim Burchett from Red Tennessee. But again, you have a standing invitation anytime because you are doing and have done such compelling things. And this book is just the latest.

I wanted to delve into it all. You know, we talk about Samuel Alito. Not too many people have over the years, really done anything much in regards to Samuel Alito. And I think your book shines some light on, and really it gives us a chance to get to know this great legal mind. Well, that's partly why I wrote it was because so many people who I respect some of his colleagues included had wondered why nobody talks about him because he is so important

on the court and he definitely has less of that really loud personality that Ascalia had but that doesn't mean that he has been less influential and I wanted to tell that story and it's kind of challenging when you're not dealing with like a really big personality but he does have this big moral courage that makes a lot of people in the know respect him above all, even all the other justices. And so I'm so glad I did it. I wanted to know more about him and spending years writing this and interviewing nearly 100 people. I definitely enjoyed that process and getting to know more about him. He's, he had me in your book, really, because I only know so much just by covering the court. I know his decisions. I know some very famous decisions.

that we'll get into here in just a bit. But you had me when you talked about Samuel Alito and his father and their shared love of baseball as a long-suffering Cubs fan that immediately appealed to me. But the stories around that really give you a sense of who this man is, not just this jurist. He grows up outside of Trenton.

The kids there, the boys there, would always become fans of the Yankees. or the Phillies. If you're a Yankees fan, that means that you get tons of victory throughout the season, lots of penance. And if you're a Phillies fan,

it means that you, like you just said, are long suffering. There are a lot of defeats. And he has later said he thinks this did shape his personality. And there's a book that says that the psychology

related to being a fan of a losing team actually gives you more resilience. I like to think so. Yeah. He kind of wears it with pride now. But he loved baseball. He and his friends growing up, his favorite toy, so to speak, was his baseball glove. He played a lot of baseball.

There was the story that I knew before I began, which is that when he played on the DOJ, you know, fielded a baseball team or a softball team that played on the mall, his friends on the team would say that he would have some amazing home run and he would just put his head down and walk around the bases or he'd have a great catch. and same thing. I interviewed someone that knew him from childhood, and they said the exact same thing about him. And it just made me laugh. Like, this guy hasn't changed. And he, or, you know, his classmates would say that he knew the answer to everything,

but he would only give it if he were called upon in class, giving everybody else the opportunity to get it wrong first or get it right. I don't even know how you create someone like that, although he says he was deeply influenced by his parents and his, Dad was a brilliant but humble man, certainly. So I think that had a lot of influence on him as well. Well, you just love to hear stories of people like that, people who are in, you know, the public eye, people who have attained a great deal of celebrity, but remain moored to their moral center. And the fact that, you know, so much in your book, he talks about, you know, just how those values.

of his parents in his family life shaped him. Did that ultimately shape his view of how to read the Constitution, how to deliver justice? He talks a lot about things that happened in his childhood related to his parents. They emphasized education. He was the grandson four times over of immigrants and the son of an immigrant. His dad came over when he was a baby from southern Italy. And his parents had learned that education was this great equalizer and liberator that with a good education, you could transcend your circumstances, which had been very humble in the case of the four grandparents and two of the grandparents in particular. So his parents emphasize education.

His dad has a judge-like presence. He serves as a one-man congressional research service for the New Jersey legislature. And he took his job so seriously that his own family didn't know his politics because he had to be nonpartisan. And he also learns about the impact of court decisions from a young age because the Supreme Court held that if you created your state legislatures in the manner that the United States legislature is done, you know, where you have representation in the House, but then you have a geographic representation for the Senate, that that was unconstitutional. So bad decision, certainly, but one that you had to comply with nonetheless. And his dad has to redraw, single-handedly redraw the congressional maps in a way that Democrats and Republicans will both sign on to. Oh, my goodness. And does it, just like on his own with a, you know, a counting machine that younger Samuel Alito could hear going at all hours of the night.

And he also really likes order. I think because he's so shy, less like. to interject or put put himself out there. I think he likes ordered debate. He gets into debate society fairly early. He likes Latin. He likes literature, just things that are less spontaneous and more about structure. And so I think all of that had a heavy influence on him as well.

Yeah, you note the detailed oriented young man and man Samuel Alito became. And an individual who obviously enjoyed a particular sport, but he also enjoyed the cerebral life. Seemed like, am I correct? I don't want to misstate this, but was he kind of a book nerd? Well, he didn't just play baseball. He also ran track. Oh, yes, right. He becomes the president of his class.

He does a lot of different activities. he turns in a paper when he's a, you know, a teenager. And his English teacher tells him that he did a good job, but that he should be doing more advanced reading. And I think he views this as one of the pivotal moments of his life. Instead of going to, you know, to the scholastic book fair type place to pick out a book, he starts, I think she gave him a list of the books they're reading at the boarding school or the elite school that he doesn't go to, you know, at the point.

public school. And he starts encountering much richer literature. James Joyce and Faulkner and people that he just has a he realizes, oh, you can operate it on a whole new level. So he does get into

that. He's certainly a good Latin scholar. He's just a good student. I don't know if he didn't want to be known as just a good student. Or if he was just truly well balanced in all of this. I think he, I mean, I think he was was just very well balanced and athletic.

I think that's actually something that people don't know about him. He's the tallest justice. He's imposing. He's got, he's got a, you know, he's fit, cares about fitness. And it always has. Just like Elena Kagan. I jest. We'll talk about Elena Kagan coming up here and the left side of the court.

But speaking of the left, how much did going to college in the fallout, of the radical Marxist 60s movement into the 70s. How much did that influence his thinking, both just as a human being and then obviously in the practice of law? I think this is also big. He gets into Princeton by virtue of his brilliance. You know, this was an expensive school for rich kids. But he gets in, and he and the other public school kids that get in,

they assume that they're going to struggle versus the boarding school kids. And they discover almost immediately, oh, that's not a problem at all. They realize that they have more going for them in the academic and intellectual department. But related to that, Princeton was one of the last Kay Ivey League schools to get hit by radicalism, but it gets hit. And they'd recently accepted women. And so there are all sorts of like movements happening on campus. Samuel Alito had gotten a low draft number.

So he decides to join the ROTC. He knows he knows he's going to get called up. So he's like, I might as well just join the ROTC. And he does that. And the protests against the ROTC are serious. I mean, they were run off of campus. It gets so bad one semester that they just cancel classes. They make going to class optional.

They make taking finals optional. For someone like Samuel Alito, who had, worked very hard to get in and who needed an education to transcend his middle class existence, he looks at these other people and he realizes, oh, they get to play at radicalism for a few years. And then they go work in their fancy jobs given to them by their parents. And it makes him respect these elites even less. And I think it might be why these elite institutions never captured him, like they capture so many people that would be in his similar situation. He actually doesn't regard them as that smart

or interesting or worth like worth caring about what their opinions are of him. He kind of thinks they're losers. And so right, he's right by the way. That is a very fair and right judgment of Samuel Alito. You know, but he goes to Yale law. Yale law doesn't capture him like it captures so many other people. And he just doesn't change in part because he respects the value. of his own family more than what he saw there. Yeah. No, I could definitely see how that informed how he would move forward in his professional life, in his legal life in particular.

So he becomes pretty quickly, well respected in the field of law, take us through his early career, and then ultimately his ascension to. the federal court system? He probably would have liked to have gone to graduate school prior to law school. He loves big ideas and thinking that way. But he realizes that since he'll have to do his service, if he goes to get a degree in philosophy or something like that, and then law school and then does his service, it's going to take forever for him to get his life going.

So he goes straight to law school. He gets out, does his service. and then clerks for a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which is there in New Jersey. He had a couple offers, but he chose that one so he could be close to his below. Nobody loves New Jersey as much as Samuel Alito loves New Jersey. It actually kind of is humorous to me. But he realizes when he clerks on this court that he would like to be a judge someday, that that would be kind of a dream job. And also, maybe it will never happen.

He goes and works for the U.S. attorney there in New Jersey, ends up going to work in the DOJ. He gets hired under Carter in a non-political position, but ends up working in the Reagan administration. And during that time, he starts attending Federalist Society meetings. And that's how the Reagan people realized, like they didn't know because he never shares his opinion on anything or, you know, didn't talk politics. He realized he's conservative. And so they bring him on to the Office of Legal Counsel there. They had to convince everybody that he was, in fact, with them politically because he had never worked on a campaign like most of the people do to get a job as a political in an administration. And just by virtue of his hard work ethic and his brilliance, people just keep noticing him.

He ends up becoming U.S. attorney of New Jersey. and again, manages a massive office, does so well, complicated place. That's a lot of mafia cases. And, you know, he handles like a big terrorism case. And he just continues to be well respected. And then there's an opening back on that Third Circuit court that he'd clerked on. And he goes for it and gets it. And then that's when people throughout the country start realizing,

oh, this guy is good. He just never fails. He never misses. He doesn't have, you know how you have like a justice you might love, but then you're like, why did they decide that? Like, I love Justice Scalia, and I hate Employment Division B. Smith, his decision limiting religious freedom for religious minorities. Or you might really like Gorsuch.

And then you're like, what was Bostock? That decision that said that the Civil Rights Act is for people who are men who identify as women. I mean, just a joke of a decision. And Samuel Alito just doesn't have. that he just is consistent and does his work and then does it really quietly well i i i don't want to jump too far ahead but here i go i'm going to do that because you brought up uh neil gorsuch um does Samuel Alito uh through his his legal life does he believe that america is a creedal nation

Federalist Senior Editor John Daniel Davidson wrote a very interesting piece on that. And his take on it was in the headline, Neil Gorsuch is wrong. America isn't a creedal nation. And this is what the justice said about it, Gorsuch. What unites us is not a religion. It's not a race. It's a belief in those three ideals. He told a national review online and a resource.

and podcast to Nick Gillespie of reason, he said, our nation is not founded on a religion. It's not based on a common culture, even, or heritage. It's based on those ideas. We're a creedal nation. How does Samuel Alito feel about that? I can't say for sure, having not inquired about this specifically, but I imagine, based on everything else he's written, that he would say that the problem, with the claim that we're a creedal nation isn't that we're not. It's that we're not only a creedal nation. We do have a creed.

It is very important. Anyone who identifies as an originalist and both Gorsuch and Samuel Alito do would say that the founding documents are very important about who we are. And that if the Constitution is the blueprint for how we govern, the declaration is that creed that identifies us. Where I think Samuel Alito would be different than Gorsuch would be in, basically, for him, there's so much more than just this autistic approach that a lot of people take. He would say, look at the declaration.

Yes, it has that like big phrasing right at the beginning, but what is the substance of the document? It's all about how the king violated the laws that the, that the people of America were subjected to, subject to. And that shared culture, the Magna Carta, the rules, the laws from England, that that is what united these people and also the entire basis of what they were declaring independence from. They were a particular people with a particular approach. And I mean that particularly when you look at the global, the difference from where they were from the rest of the globe.

And also Samuel Alito is, he's identified himself as a practical originalist. And part of that, I mean, there's so many different parts of that that you can pull from. Part of that is just that he cares more about the particulars of a case before him than making some big, broad brush philosophical statement. It also means that he thinks about the ramifications on lower court judges and other agents involved in law enforcement. But even at his confirmation hearing, he talked about traditions and values and community values and how the law should not violate those. He's much more nuanced than a Scalia or Gorsuch on these things, I'd say.

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No doubt about it. And as you note in the book, he enjoys consensus where he can find. find it. He's not willing to sacrifice his principles for consensus, but he does believe in a collegial court. Unfortunately, he is in the wrong place these days. We'll talk about that a little bit more in just a moment. But I want to go back and dwell a little bit as we move into his confirmation process into his opening days as a Supreme Court justice and, you know, how it became in a lot of regards known as the Samuel Alito court. Our guest today, as I said before, and I think you know it, one of the all-time great Hemingway's, Molly Hemingway, Federalist Editor-in-Chief,

and she is also the author of the enlightening new book, Samuel Alito, the Justice who reshaped the Supreme Court and restored the Constitution. And here we go on that path of restoring the Constitution. I believe that's a work in progress, but I do believe that Samuel Alito, in just by reading some of his key decisions, can indeed be said to be in the process of restoring the court. Take us through, though, the confirmation process. It wasn't quite like a Brett Kavanaugh, and you've written about that particular process, but certainly it had a radical left trying to keep. him out? Well, I think the more interesting thing is to even go back prior to his nomination to that whole situation. So the Bush administration lasted two terms. They were pretty sure that they would get an opportunity to fill a Supreme Court slot almost immediately when he took office in 2001. But they may get through that entire first term without anyone retiring. Rehnquist had served a long time.

Chief Justice William Rainquist had served a long time by that point. He was dealing with very serious cancer. He'd taken a lot of time off of the bench. They were just assuming he would be retiring no later than the end of the term in 2005. So they just got ready to appoint or to pick someone to be a chief justice to replace him. And Samuel Alito was on the shortlist then, as was just kind of like shocking what a bullet was dodged. Mike Lutig, who's the seemingly unhinged person who never was able to psychologically deal with his failure to get that slot and has just gone off the deep end.

Yes, thank you, Neo-Conns for that, by the way. Well, he really, he was kind of considered the good conservative pick by many people who you would probably respect. I have no idea really what happened there, and they're all embarrassed that they ever thought he would be consistent. But anyway, Samuel Alito was on that list. Chief Justice John Roberts was on that list. Instead of the Chief Justice Rehnquist retiring,

it's Sandra Day O'Connor. And the Bush admin was very focused on identity politics. They were like, we should probably pick a woman, but we've already done this. So we'll just pick John Roberts. And if we get another opening, we'll pick a woman for that. So they pick John Roberts right before he's ready for his nomination hearings, Ranguist dies.

So they decide to pull his nomination for the O'Connor slot and make him the nominee for the chief. He goes flying through. I thought that was interesting because there were some people who raised alarm bells at the time. Like he ends up being, I would say, pretty good, but a disappointment. but if you look at his track record prior to being on the court, nobody should have been surprised. And Randy Barnett wrote a piece at that time that said, like, who is this guy? We don't know anything about him. He's definitely played the political game well to get nominated, but we don't know what he thinks about anything.

Okay. So that goes through. And then they're like, we have to pick a woman. But most of the women were too conservative for the Bush team. so they didn't like how conservative many of these women were, or they'd been caught up in Democrats filibusters, so they hadn't had enough time on a court to be nominated. So they end up picking Harriet Myers,

who's simply like a Texas lawyer who served as counsel for the White House. And the conservative movement loses its mind. I don't remember. We did not put you in office. Like we put up with a lot of stuff from you. we're not going to put up with this. And so major rebellion, you mentioned Chip Roy earlier,

major rebellion that he was a part of there in the Senate. And as a staffer, they kind of let it be known. We're not going to tolerate this. And Harriet Myers yourself doesn't do very well in the interviews because she's not a constitutional lawyer. And so she ends up pulling her nomination. And usually when you have to pull a nomination, that means that you get a weaker person now.

So a great example would be when Reagan nominated Bork and that didn't work out. He then nominates Anthony Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. So much weaker than a Borg. But in this case, because the rebellion had happened from the base of the party, Bush all of a sudden had to assuage the base. And he realized that his particular obsession with identity politics was not shared by the base. They actually just want to do it solely on merit and quality. So he's kind of forced into picking Samuel Alito.

And because there's a majority of Republicans in the Senate, they don't really worry about his nomination so much, except insofar as he might have to fight a filibuster, which at the time they still had the Supreme Court filibuster. And John Kerry does at the end of the process call for a filibuster, but he called for it from his like private plane in Davos, Switzerland. And so everything just kind of laughed and said, let's ignore him. Yes.

Well, you know the joke about John Kerry has always been. Why the long face, John? Oh, I'm sorry. You were born that way. But yeah, that sounds about right to me. John Kerry trying to force a filibuster from his jet plane. He's talking about climate change somewhere. But so the battle is not really internal.

And this, Molly, this to me, speaks of a time where the base is really beginning to turn. And I think that's fascinating, what you mentioned about how they rejected the kinder, gentler conservatism of the son of the guy who coined that phrase and the identity politics that were in play. I think those were the, really, some of the roots of what we would find to be the Republican Revolution, so to speak, in 2010. Of course, it took an Obama to really get there. but so Samuel Alito is well respected throughout his legal career and now he's well respected by the people who want to see him serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Yeah, people just, people just noticed him. One of the things that I learned through the Brett Kavanaugh book was how much people campaign for a Supreme Court slot. And that is with a few exceptions. I mean, in fact, enough exceptions. to mean, it's just, I just never really thought about the campaigns for these slots. They have teams of people who want particular candidates to be considered. Samuel Alito was not a campaigner.

Thomas, not a campaigner. I'd actually say Amy Coney Barrett also not a campaigner. But a lot of these people have these active clerk networks that are lobbying for people. And that's not a bad thing necessarily. It's how do you know that people are good? or if you don't have a good handle on their previous work and all that. But Samuel Alito, it's kind of remarkable that he does get on the court because he's not a self-promoter. And people, if he's known for anything, it's for not self-promoting.

But he does make it on there. And I have in the book that thing that Justice Scalia tells him of the first five years you're here, you will wonder how you got here. And then the rest of the time, you'll wonder. how anyone else got here. And it is true that there's a variety in quality of justices. Oh, yes. Particularly these days,

what we saw on the three liberals, of course, I quickly point to, and some disappointing conservatives as well. But let us talk about that time on the Supreme Court. Again, you describe Samuel Alito as, you know, someone who is, you know, very studied about how to make a ruling, how to put together a ruling and how to, you know, stand on a decision. Very practical. So what's the first case that you see where that really is coming to the four?

I am not sure about the first case, but going through his jurisprudence, one of the things that strikes me is how so many of the cases that hit the Supreme Court are statutory, not constitutional. And there are certain justices that are better at statutory reading interpretation than constitutional and vice versa. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was highly regarded by her peers for her statutory interpretation. She ends up not having much influence because of the nature of the court. She's on a court where Anthony Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has the influence for almost the entirety of the time that she's there. Speaking of a campaigner, right? That guy really campaigned for that position. I think so, yeah.

And I think that if you look at, okay, there are a few different. like streams of cases. One would deal with union, unions and the First Amendment rights of workers. So one of the ways that unions have had so much power is that they take money from the employees, even if the employees are not in the unions, and then they use those funds to advocate for particular political causes. And it was during much of the time that a Lido has been on the court, that had been an issue. And he didn't have the other justices, like, totally with him. But he would figure out a way to get five of them together on some grounds to move the ball

down the field in some direction. And I put this in comparison to a Scalia or a Thomas. We love, I say we, I guess people, there might be people out there who don't love Scalia or Thomas. They're wrong, by the way. But people love Scalia. and Thomas because they take these really big, bold, audacious positions and they write very clearly and punchily and, you know, sometimes viciously and people love that.

But you'll notice that they're usually writing dissents or concurrences where you don't have to get a majority of people with you to say what you're going to say. Samuel Alito is more concerned about did we move the ball down the field? did we get in a better place than we were when we started? And that might mean that you have to include viewpoints that you wouldn't have included if you were writing a solo thing, or you have to figure out a way to keep two people with you who have dramatically different views of the underlying statute. So you have to write in a way that is a big enough umbrella to keep them both in without angering them

and getting one of them out. So he's just more practical that way. and the union free speech rights is one example of that, but so is religious freedom. This is one of the big motivating issues for Samuel Alito. And it was since before he got on the Supreme Court, Scalia does that employment division v. Smith decision. And Samuel Alito's trying to find ways to protect religious minorities' rights,

even on the lower court. When he gets on the main court, I think it's been a project of his to improve the situation that was wrought under. employment division v. Smith, and to just work steadily to increase the religious rights of institutions and how they run themselves. Yeah, and that really is. I mean, he's playing the long-term game here. He's playing the move in, as is in the title of your book, the restoration of the constitution, the restoration of primary first rights. And you see, you see.

see that at just about every turn. At the same time, he realizes that there are different philosophies and different ideologies on this court. So how is he able to move that ball forward? Is it because of his reasoning, his consensus building, his practical nature? So I think there are a few justices who are truly strategic in their thinking. And I would put, by the way, Elena Kagan as one of those justices. She thinks through how to, she knows she's in the minority, but she's thinking, how can I get the best possible scenario for what I care about? Clarence Thomas is also very strategic in a way that Scalia was not. He is his bold pronouncements about where the law should be understood. He does that as part of a strategy that works very well if you have an Samuel Alito on the

court to move things in that direction you want them to be. But Samuel Alito is also very, very, strategic and I think it's interesting that the left picked up on this long before the right did and so it's all sorts of things Matt it's deciding which cases are going to come before the court and when knowing enough about the way your fellow justices feel about given issues to know if the particular facts of a given case will it will mean that they will want to grant cert on that case hear that case and then working with that case as it works its way through, you know, through briefing and oral argument and conference to narrow the grounds on which you make that decision in the best possible way. And then if you are assigned the opinion, and that's

something that you don't totally control, right? The senior most justice assigns the opinion. So if that includes Chief John Roberts. The Chief Justice always has seniority. But if it doesn't include, then it goes to Thomas, or I guess it would go to Samuel Alito after that. And if you are assigned the opinion, again, thinking about how to be generous with that opinion. Samuel Alito's most famous landmark decision will be for all time, the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. And for that, it took courage, took an immense amount of courage for each of the justices to sign on to that, because I don't know if they truly understood how much their lives would be threatened as they were by the end, but they knew it was going to be fierce in that previous justices had not been able to withstand the pressure. So he has to write this in a way that keeps all five people on board, even if they have particular and opposing views. You know, Clarence Thomas has a very particular view of the 14th Amendment and how. rights should be applied from there. And Brett Kavanaugh has pretty much the opposite view.

So how do you write it in a way that holds everybody together? And it's just, it takes, it takes genius and hard work. And Samuel Alito has both of those in spades. No doubt about it. I think when that Dobbs decision came down, of course, by the time it came down, there was a leak. And so we had a pretty good idea where, this thing was going. And we knew what was happening because the left was, as it has been doing

for a very long time in this country, losing its collective mind, much of it by design. And of course, we saw all kinds of attacks on religious organizations and pro-life organizations. Of course, at the time, we had the Autopenn president, and they were doing nothing about all of that. But, you know, all of this stuff. It's not happening in a bubble. And you actually end up, you tell us a lot of stuff that we don't know about Samuel Alito, but you break some pretty big news in this story. And that is the foot dragging that is going on from a particular liberal justice. Let's kind of walk through the timing of all of this and why it was so very dangerous. I had wanted to write about justice. Samuel Alito before he authored the Dobbs opinion and before the leak.

But by the time those things happened, I knew that I had to write that story down about what had happened. We look at, if I can just like back my way into this, you look at what happened with the most recent assassination attempt on President Trump. And one of my colleagues at Fox had said, if President Obama had had three, you know, legitimate near-missus assassination attempts, the Democrats would have outlawed the Republican Party by now. And there's something that people have like internalized about being second-class citizens

on the right that just blows me away. But the level of violence that happened in following the Dobbs decision is shocking. So I tell the whole story. How did the Dobbs case make its way to the Supreme Court? How do they grant cert? how do they end up with their oral arguments and how do those go? And then what is the conference like after that? That's where the nine justices meet in private.

How quickly Samuel Alito gets this monster decision out, how it devastates the liberal justices because it leaves no stone unturned. It makes it difficult to figure out like what are we even going to say? Because they also had the disadvantage of nobody thinking Roe was good law. Like literally nobody with a brain thinks that was. was a good decision. For almost 50 years. Yeah.

You don't have to be pro-life or conservative to think it was bad. Just everybody did. So, but the majority is done and everybody signed on to by the middle of February. So they're ready to go. But a decision normally isn't released until you have the dissent. So it gets leaked. The draft decision gets leaked. They know about it by the end of April.

I think it's early May when it comes out. and immediately there are firebomings of churches and pregnancy centers. There are daily protests at the homes of the justices whose addresses have been posted online for the purpose of breaking the law. Like it's against the law to protest a judge or justice with the idea that you're going to change their mind. That was the only reason these protests were happening. And yet the DOJ did nothing.

Congress did next to nothing. the president supported the protests. His press secretary said, we think they should continue in the way that they've been going, which they described as peaceful. They weren't. And they were against the law again. And it gets so bad that they arrest an attempted assassin

at the Brett Kavanaugh home, where he lives with his wife and children. Other justices don't just live with their spouses. They live with their children. They had to put on bulletproof vests. they had to be moved to secure locations. If this had happened to anyone on the left, the media and other left-wing organizations

would have put an immediate stop to it. Yes. And we did not see that. Right. Yeah. So the next time they meet in conference, Samuel Alito asks when they are going to have their dissent done. Because every day that it goes on is another day with attacks on their lives.

And they demur. they don't really say what their plan is. I think it was Gorsuch asks for a date that they'll be done. They don't want to give a date. And then after that conference, Elena Kagan goes to Justice Breyer's chambers and screams at him to not accommodate his friends who are conservative on the court

because she knew he was the most likely to accommodate them because he was a gentleman on the court and they all loved him. And then they finally get the decision. out in June. I'm sorry, they finally get the dissent done in June, but they include this completely gratuitous and unnecessary footnote to another decision that is legitimately still being worked on by both sides, knowing that they can't mention the outcome of a decision that hasn't been released yet. So it delays it another three plus weeks. And during that time is when

Brett Kavanaugh and his kids are nearly killed. It's horrible, horrible. And we, you know, we see obviously the impact of that. And it's still resonating to this day, but it's unconscionable to me. What has anybody, here's the problem. I see, Molly, just like so many other things. The federalist, you and the federalist are reporting on this stuff. This is big news.

But, of course, the New York Times and the Washington Post and the usual suspects in the Accomplice Media, they don't want to talk about that. So it's their big sin of omission, just like so many other things. But I mean, this is unconscionable by this left wing of the court. How is nobody saying, bringing that up and saying, aren't there repercussions for something like that? So I think we know why they don't talk about it, which is that they are playing a political game and it would not help them politically to reveal how political the liberal justices are being. And so I was just fascinated right before my book comes out or right at the same time my book comes out, there's reporting that the liberal justices were slow walking the Kallai, Kaleigh.

Kaleigh, yeah, Louisiana. I was going to ask you about that. Louisiana versus Kaleigh. And, you know, that is this critical decision that just came out about redistricting. and redistricting based on race. And now we hear that Elena Kagan is slow walking this decision. And I think that's like been all but decisively proven. So after my book comes out and after this reporting,

that she's slow walking, hoping to drag it out to the end of the term, because if she does, then legislatures won't have time to redraw their maps. And if they don't have time, that will help Democrats, her party. And Elena Kagan is far in a way the most political. I don't even mean that in a bad way necessarily. She comes from more like a Democrat political world and knows how to play politics. Usually justices are awful at politics. Like they think they're good and they're all awful.

She actually is pretty good about doing it and getting a desired outcome. But after this reporting comes out, they do finally release the decision. And, you know, they have the dissent. I can't help but wonder what the reporting had to do. with getting it out. And then you see more slow walking, right? The decision comes out. The left is outraged that they won't be able to artificially manufacture these racist

gerrymanders and they're losing their minds. And so then they try to appeal various aspects back to the court. The three liberal justices, two of them are much more savvy than the third, Ketanji Brown Jackson Ketanji Brown Jackson. She basically throws a hissy fit that the other two were smart enough not to throw. but because she throws the hissy fit that is completely ungrounded by law or reality, it gives Samuel Alito the opportunity to include a footnote saying, we conferenced this back in October.

Interesting. And the point being, y'all slow walked this, and it's worse than October. They actually first heard the case the previous March, and then they had to rehear it in October. So they've had nothing but time on this. And I think it does confirm that reporting for it for the for this case that they were slow walking. Well, speaking of Ketanji Brown Jackson, the, in birthright citizenship, the thing that immediately comes to mind is her idiotic idea of allegiance to a government. Her her whole story about, well, you know, if I were in France and I robbed someone, I took their wallet, I would have allegiance to France because I would. be involved in the legal system, which of course, everybody panned as stupid because it was.

Samuel Alito actually recently has, I think he's had enough. And he speaks about Ketanji Brown Jackson in ways that are, in some ways, it seems to be a little unalito like that he is actually saying these things in public. What do you think about all of that? I don't know. I actually assume I'm speaking a little bit speculatively here, but I assume he'd had enough of her long ago. What I find more interesting is that Elena Kagan and Sotomayor and Brett Kavanaugh seem to have had enough of her. These are people, I mean, either there are people on her same quote unquote side or there are people who are just known for going out of their way to be forbearing and nice. And she she's really not at the same caliber. of the other justices. You know, I imagine it's particularly painful for Elena Kagan, who is respected by her colleagues. Her legal reasoning is respected.

They don't agree with her, but they consider her a worthy opponent. And Jackson, I was at that birthplace citizenship oral argument for all three hours of it. And I remember that Jackson's questions at first seemed pretty good. whom she worked on them or her clerks helped her with them. But then she comes up with that idea that if she steals a wallet in Japan, that makes her a Japanese citizen or something. The turning Japanese, I really think so, to think is how I've described it. And what struck me about that is that I got the impression she thought it was a good question.

She kind of leans back in her chair and kind of does that smirk like, I got them now. and everybody else is looking like, this can't be real that this woman is on the court. By comparison, I would just like to point out that, again, Elena Kagan, but also especially Samuel Alito, are very good at oral argument. The purpose isn't to show yourself off

or to have something the Washington Post goes, as they do every time Ketanji Brown Jackson speaks. Oh, my goodness, she is the best. She is the smartest. We don't deserve her, or whatever the Washington Post, says the point is to narrow the argument to the place where you want it decided upon. Yes. And Samuel Alito is brilliant at that.

And he's also masterful at asking a series of hypothetical questions that they're obliged to answer. And they start out so easy to answer. And then by the end, he has completely destroyed the advocate's argument. It was, and he's done it many, many times. But the birthright citizenship case, I think, really showed how he can tear apart any argument, but certainly the argument of who is at Catherine O'Hara, the late great Catherine O'Hara, who, you know, I loved from the beginning of Second City Television when I was a kid. She said she always loved playing the role of the confident

idiot because they were the funniest. And that's what I quite frankly see in Ketanji Brown Jackson Ketanji Brown Jackson. She is playing the role of the confident idiot on this court. And I think the justices, all of them have said, that's a bit too much for us. Okay. And Matt, I do want to say, I do think that she could do well to not listen to the Washington Post and other left-wing outlets and their praise. And she's not a dumb woman per se. You can't be dumb and reach the heights that she has reached. She has a good education in many ways. And if she were to spend a couple years just maybe observing who's most persuasive on the court and then emulate them, it might serve her well. She's there for her whole lifetime.

So I would just say, I would encourage her to think about how her reputation is forming and whether it's going in the right direction. I don't know. It might sound silly to even make that suggestion. No, I think you're right. I think she, like so many intelligent people or people who have a good deal of intelligence on the left, have been seduced by critical theory. And Ketanji Brown Jackson looks at justice through the prism of social justice and equity and all of these sorts of things, of course, that rip apart the Constitution, which gets us to really the core of your book and the core of this man. Samuel Alito Lito. He is playing the longer game.

And the longer game is existential. And so my final question to you is, where do you see this justice going and this court moving forward, knowing as I believe Samuel Alito does, and I know that Clarence Thomas does, that we are in an existential struggle in this republic?

I think I might disagree with a lot of people on the right right now in how I view this as far and away the best court we've had in history. It is a majority originalist court. They are doing good work. I'm not in any way praising everything. The big divides you see among the originalists right now are on pacing issues. and Thomas and Samuel Alito who've been there, you know, 35 and 20 years, respectively, they understand that you're not always going to have an originalist majority on the court and that you have to act now for what needs to be done. And also they tend to think that injustice should be solved immediately, that people suffer under injustice,

and so it should be corrected as soon as you're able to do it. The younger justices, and it's worth remembering, like all three, Trump justices were with that Dobbs decision. Without those people, you wouldn't have had the overturning of Roe. Like have some perspective here. But they tend to think they've got much more time. I mean, they do have more time, assuming all things are equal. And they're more cavalier or casual about the pacing. And that's probably not, that's probably something they could think about a little bit more to and understand the perspective of their more experience. peers. But then more largely, I think that we as a country and then the conservative

movement have had some struggles with understanding how to balance principle and pragmatism. And we have so many heroes that are heroes like mostly for the principal. And you've had a huge rebellion among people saying they kind of don't care about principle anymore. They just want to win. And I think Samuel Alito is the perfect model for showing that, principle and pragmatism go together, that they work quite beautifully together, and that this is the model going forward, that these two sides are not in conflict, but do better together. And I think that you'll see that, not just in the conservative legal movement, but in the conservative movement and beyond that as well.

I think that's why I so enjoyed this book, because it is first and foremost, it's opening the curtain on a man who, you know, has not been part of the big public spotlight when we talk about the Supreme Court. I think this book opens that door and I think opens that interest. But at the end of the day, you have a man, you have a justice who understands that at 250 years, now we're celebrating in July of this nation, a little bit shorter than that of this republic, through a constitution, there have been a lot of things that have happened, a lot of things that has shaken, you know, this constitution and this republic. But it endures. But for it to endure, you do have to play the long game. And I think it's exactly what you just said. What I got to learn about,

a gentleman introduced to me who does not give away his principles, but understands how to be practical in the pursuit of justice and the pursuit of restoring the Constitution. It is, I understand why it is a Washington, excuse me, a New York Times bestseller, even if the New York Times doesn't want it to be. Here we are. So congratulations. It's a wonderful book. Well, thank you very much, Matt, and it was great talking to you.

Absolutely. And, you know, you still have a standing invitation. Maybe we'll bring you in with Chip and Mike and maybe Tim. We'll talk about some things. I think that would be a fascinating conversation. I would love that. Indeed. Thanks to my guest today, Molly Hemingway, the Federalist editor-in-chief and author of the best-selling new book, Samuel Alito, the Justice who reshaped the Supreme Court and restored the Constitution. You've been listening to another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour.

I'm Matt Kittle's senior elections correspondent at the Federalist. We'll be back soon with more. Until then, stay lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.

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