Sam Alito Is The Pettiest Bitch Alive

Sorry, not sorry.

Has there ever been a bigger snowflake than Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito? A public figure so willing to jettison the decorum of his office to howl at his critics? A man so supremely indignant that anyone would dare speak out against him?

Honestly, it's pathetic. This 73-year-old manbaby is showing his whole ass again, whining to two conservative commentators at the Wall Street Journal (shocker!) that no one in history has ever had it so tough:

Justice Alito says “this type of concerted attack on the court and on individual justices” is “new during my lifetime. . . . We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances. And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us. The idea has always been that judges are not supposed to respond to criticisms, but if the courts are being unfairly attacked, the organized bar will come to their defense.” Instead, “if anything, they’ve participated to some degree in these attacks.”

Why won't the legal establishment rally around five justices who tossed out decades of precedent on grounds of fuck you, we're the majority now? Yeah, it's a headscratcher!

But his interviewers are so overcome with sympathy for the jurist's unparalleled tale of woe that they're able to tune out the klaxons of cognitive dissonance — not to mention gross historical inaccuracy — of his message.

"The losing side has even resorted to violence before: Antiabortion extremists assassinated four abortion doctors between 1993 and 2009," they admit, before seamlessly pivoting to the greatest injustice of all: attacks on the court's legitimacy.

But as the court has grown more conservative in recent years, the left has stepped up the attacks on the court’s “legitimacy,” including character assassination of individual justices, with little objection from mainstream Democrats and plenty of help from the media.

And so, to his critics who note that Alito is constantly giving speeches and interviews that compromise the integrity of his office, they respond that the poor man had no choice.

Judges are in a double bind: If they don’t respond, the attacks stand. If they do, they diminish the mystique on which judicial authority depends.

Alito is still pissed about the leak of his Dobbs opinion gutting abortion rights for women, which he describes as an attempt to pressure conservative justices into defecting from the majority by making them "targets of assassination."

And he's pissed about having to deal with gross ladyparts stuff, however you pronounce it:

Justice Alito finds these applications a nuisance. “They’re very disruptive. But what are we supposed to do? They are brought to us. The last administration brought a lot of them to us because a lot of its programs were enjoined. This administration is doing the same thing right now. The solicitor general has said that she’s likely to file an application here to stay the Fifth Circuit’s order in the case involving the—mifestiprone? However you pronounce the word.” It’s mifepristone, an abortion drug that a lower court had said the Food and Drug Administration erred in approving.

It’s April 13 when Justice Alito tells us: “I have to prepare for a sitting next week. The next two weeks we have arguments. I have to prepare for all of those cases. But when this comes in, I’m going to have to put all that aside and deal with it.”

For the record, Justice Alito issued an administrative stay in the Alliance case, then unleashed a broadside against his fellow conservatives for failing to take advantage of an opportunity to deny women healthcare. Ever on brand, the man enraged by the tiniest slight dismissed the actual harms to the FDA's authority to regulate medication and a drug company being forced to remove its product from the marketplace, not to say to women themselves, as mere speculation.

Alito is also furious that those who would undermine the Court's legitimacy by observing that it has become a de facto organ of the Republican Party:

Those who throw the mud then disparage the justices for being dirty. “We’re being bombarded with this,” Justice Alito says, “and then those who are attacking us say, ‘Look how unpopular they are. Look how low their approval rating has sunk.’ Well, yeah, what do you expect when you’re—day in and day out, ‘They’re illegitimate. They’re engaging in all sorts of unethical conduct. They’re doing this, they’re doing that’?”

It “undermines confidence in the government,” Justice Alito says. “It’s one thing to say the court is wrong; it’s another thing to say it’s an illegitimate institution. You could say the same thing about Congress and the president. . . . When you say that they’re illegitimate, any of the three branches of government, you’re really striking at something that’s essential to self-government.”

How dare you notice that Republicans refused to fill Scalia's seat, then blew up the filibuster to allow a president who lost the popular vote to name three justices who have systematically enacted policies disfavored by the majority of Americans!

And no, he will not be answering questions about his colleague Clarence Thomas's eccentric habit of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of hospitality from a rightwing billionaire every year. Nor will he be addressing his own habit of hobnobbing with rich conservatives with business before the court and tipping them off when a decision they like is in the offing — not that his WSJ interlocutors asked!

He's far too busy inveighing against law students who shout insults and say he shouldn't be there. Don't they understand he's a Supreme Court justice, not a woman seeking to access health care? The very nerve!

  [ WSJ ]

Catch Liz Dye on Opening Arguments podcast.

Click the widget to keep your Wonkette ad-free and feisty. And if you're ordering from Amazon, use this link, because reasons .