As the far-right justice faces yet another controversy, he doesn’t exactly have a deep reservoir of credibility he can turn to in response.
https://bsky.app/profile/stevebenen.com/post/3lfctpl6a4c2c
As Samuel Alito faces yet another ethics mess of his own making, he doesn't exactly have a deep reservoir of credibility he can turn to in response.
Only about a third of Americans have confidence in the courts. Alito's in a position to push that number lower.
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/alito-trump-make-supreme-courts-troubles-even-worse-rcna186946
While I can appreciate Roberts’ concerns about the high court’s institutional reputation, if he wants to better understand why public confidence is faltering to historic degrees, there’s no shortage of evidence for the chief justice to consider. Take the latest NBC News report, for example.
Justice Samuel Alito confirmed Wednesday that he took a phone call from Donald Trump one day before the president-elect asked the Supreme Court to halt his upcoming sentencing, but insisted that the case was not discussed. Alito said in a statement that they spoke Tuesday afternoon after one of his former law clerks, William Levi, “asked me to take a call from President-elect Trump regarding his qualifications to serve in a government position.”
So let me see if I have this straight. According to the official version of events, Trump wanted to speak to the Supreme Court conservative on Tuesday about an applicant for a job in his incoming administration. As The New York Times’ report noted,
it’s unclear why the president-elect would personally “make a call to check references, a task generally left to lower-level aides.”
The two men did, in fact, chat — again, according to the official version of events — and one day later, Trump’s lawyers filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court, as part of a larger effort to delay sentencing in the Republican’s criminal case in New York.......
We are, after all, talking about a sitting justice who has earned a reputation as the Supreme Court’s most unyielding ideologue, who has delivered a series of overtly political speeches, who’s issued public endorsements of a conservative advocacy group’s work, who thought it’d be a good idea to defend the Supreme Court’s integrity at a pro-Trump organization exactly two weeks before the 2022 midterm elections, who’s appeared a bit too cozy with The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, and who’s declared his indifference to congressional oversight in ways that were panned as
“stunningly wrong.”
And did I mention the justice’s flag controversies? Because they’re another piece of the same unsightly mosaic.
Only about a third of Americans have confidence in their own country’s judiciary, but there’s no reason to assume that number can’t drop further.Roberts needs to make sure that Alito and Thomas recuse themselves on any issue regarding trump and the J6 report
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