‘How Is This Impartial Justice?’: Former US Attorney Excoriates Alito Over Admitted Bias
Member of high court was caught in secret recording
A former top federal prosecutor has delivered a forceful rebuke of Justice Samuel Alito, for the obvious right-wing bias he displayed in a secret recording made public Monday.
Joyce Vance, a US attorney during the Obama administration, criticized Alito for comments he made to advocacy journalist Lauren Windsor.
Windsor, who has made a career of exposing powerful officials by posing as ally and conversing with them in casual settings about controversial topics — and secretly recording the conversations — spoke with Alito, who wrote the 2022 ruling which overturned Roe v Wade and upended nearly half a century of national abortion rights.
Appointed to the court by President George W Bush, Alito made news more recently for flags seen flying at two of his homes which are associated with those who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in a bid to keep Donald Trump in office illegally.
Windsor reportedly spoke with Alito during a Supreme Court Historical Society dinner on June 3.
Although judges and justices are supposed to be impartial and politically unbiased, Alito revealed his far-right inclinations in the Windsor recording.
Vance, today a prominent podcaster and legal analyst, took Alito to task for his remarks.
“If Justice Alito is making comments like this to a random person at a get-together, what is he saying to his close confidants? How is this impartial justice, especially when his votes/rationale on cases are considered?” Vance asked, kicking off a social media thread Monday. “This is a Justice who believes the correct way to determine the law is via a strict appeal to ‘history & tradition’ even though both of those things assume a legal system where Black people & women have no rights.
“He commented at a Court historical society dinner, not knowing he was being taped: about ‘the difficulty of living “peacefully” with ideological opponents in the face of “fundamental” differences that 'can’t be compromised.’ He endorsed what his interlocutor described as a necessary fight to ‘return our country to a place of godliness.’ And Alito offered a blunt assessment of how America’s polarization will ultimately be resolved: ‘One side or the other is going to win.'”
Vance ended her thread by citing a troubling statistic: in cases of “standing” — or whether a given litigant is qualified to sue a given defendant — Alito rules in favor of conservative litigants 100 percent of the time and against liberal litigants in every single case.
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