The man who would be a very sloppy king
By 
The Selling of Samuel Alito involved above all claims that he was modest and minimalist, a quiet moderate lacking the ambition and pyrotechnics of your Scalias and Thomases. This campaign was quite successful, despite being transparently obvious bullshit to anyone with even passing familiarity with Alito’s judicial record even at the time. Now, it can only be regarded as one of those moments of twisted and self-serving dark comedy iin American political discourse, like “Donald Trump, economic populist” or “Donald Trump, the candidate of information security”:
As the Supreme Court careens toward the explosive end of its term, Justice Samuel Alito keeps digging himself deeper into an ethics scandal that is equal parts comical and execrable. Alito sent a letter to congressional Democrats on Wednesday resisting their calls for him to recuse from Jan. 6–related cases, once again blaming the presence of two insurrection flags flying over his homes on his wife, Martha-Ann. A day later, the court released several opinions, including a 6–3 death penalty case authored by Alito that took familiar liberties with the law and the facts. And just a few hours after that, Chief Justice John Roberts notified Senate Democrats that he would snub their request for a meeting about ethics, citing “separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence.”
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Dahlia Lithwick: I think the merits can get lost when we talk about the flags. But there is a substantive problem that we’re starting to pick up on, and that is Justice Alito, in recent weeks, making very real and serious errors in his opinions. They’re actually prompting corrections from sources that he cites, who say, “No, my work reflects the opposite of what you’re claiming.” I’d love for you to unpack that.
Mark Joseph Stern: This happened just last week in the racial gerrymandering case out of South Carolina. Alito cited the Brennan Center, a left-leaning pro-democracy group, to support the proposition that the racial turnout gap is growing—white people are voting at significantly higher rates than racial minorities. And Alito said this fact leads to the conclusion that racial data is actually less useful in drawing maps, so the court should assume that the map-drawers didn’t look at racial data, because it’s not very useful. Even though the map-drawers in this case shifted 30,000 Black residents to a new district with almost surgical precision to make a competitive district less diverse.
The Brennan Center responded that Alito completely misunderstood its work, and in fact got it backward. Bizarrely, he cited an old blog post rather than a more recent, comprehensive analysis of this issue, which would’ve shown why he was wrong. The Brennan Center said that what it actually showed was that South Carolina has better data, on the individual and community level, about racial identity than political affiliation. If Alito had read four more sentences of the blog post he cited, or read the full report that elaborates on this issue, he would have seen that the map-drawers in this case had every incentive to look at racial data! It’s clearer and more useful than data about voters’ political preferences. Alito just butchered the Brennan Center’s analysis and used it to mean the opposite of what it meant.
He received a similar rebuke from a source he cited in his dissent from the CFPB decision, too, right?
Yes. In his dissent asserting that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is funded unconstitutionally, Alito cited a book by Georgetown Law professor Josh Chafetz called Congress’s Constitution. Not once, not twice, but eight times. And it’s a very good book! But Alito cited it for the proposition that the Framers would never have wanted to let a federal agency draw its budget the way the CFPB does. And that the Framers and their English forebears would have wanted the judiciary to limit how Congress funds the executive branch.
Chafetz was so irritated by this that he felt moved to tweet that Alito got it dead wrong. Because Chafetz preemptively rebutted the theory that Alito embraced: In the book, he wrote that “text of the Constitution allows for indefinite appropriations in all contexts other than the army,” which is limited to two-year appropriations. That explicitly contradicts Alito’s pseudo-originalist claim. Also, Chafetz wrote about how the appropriations power was, early on, used in a broad and nonspecific way, which Alito deemed unconstitutional. And Chafetz wrote that this power was meant as a check on the executive by the legislative, not a judicially enforceable limit on Congress. Again, that’s the opposite of what Alito asserted. Yet the justice cited Chafetz’s book for support over and over again!
All of this is scholarly misconduct far worse than what got the president of Harvard pushed out, only with major and unaccountable public policy consequences. The MAGA in his household flags is perfectly represented in his opinions. I’m not sure why people are so upset about Martha-Ann Alito’s innocent callbacks to Phillies legend Bob Boone, though.