The whiteness of the wail
By 
Steve Lubet points out that Sam Alito can dish it out but can’t take it. Lubet doesn’t note that this makes Alito a perfect representative of the whole MAGA movement, which is made up of white supremacist crybabies who above all hate to be reminded that they’re white supremacist crybabies:
In a dissent, Jackson admonished the majority for risking “an appearance of partiality.” By speeding the decision into effect, with its “strong political undercurrent,” the conservatives seemed “to endorse Louisiana’s efforts to change its congressional map” at the expense of a Black-majority congressional district.
Ever the sore winner, Alito took umbrage. The dissent, also joined by Justices Sonya Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, had been directed at the substance of the majority decision. Alito’s retort, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, made it personal. The dissent was not only “baseless and insulting,” they said, but also “groundless and utterly irresponsible.”
Alito has not always been so sensitive to colleagues’ sharp words. For 10 years, from 2006 to 2016, he shared the Supreme Court bench with the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who was legendary for his scathing rebukes of fellow justices.
Not once, as far as I can discover in the public record, did Alito express disapproval of Scalia’s epic jibes, which make Jackson’s dissent look routine in comparison. . . .
Scalia was at his most acerbic two years later, when the court fully legalized same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges. He described the majority opinion as a “judicial Putsch” lacking “even a thin veneer of law.” If he had joined such an opinion, with the “mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie,” Scalia wrote that he would would “hide my head in a bag.”
Other examples of Scalia’s broadsides are legion. He has charged his colleagues with endorsing a “sporting-chance theory of criminal law” akin to a “casino operator,” and with perpetrating a “game of bait-and-switch.”
Alito never objected to these characterizations, remaining a passive enabler, even when the barb — such as taxing “the credulity of the credulous” — was aimed at an opinion he himself had joined. . . .
As [Jackson] predicted, the Callais decision has likely opened the door to the most sweeping dilution of minority electoral power since the end of Reconstruction. Strong language should not have been startling in response to the historic reversal of voting rights.
In Alito’s jurisprudence, it is apparently just fine to rail abrasively against rulings in favor of same-sex couples and criminal defendants, but it is inexcusable to accurately describe the consequences of his own decisions.
I don’t think it’s possible to understand Donald Trump, MAGA, or indeed the whole post-Goldwater Republican party, of which the two former phenomena are merely the perhaps inevitable full ideological flowering, without understanding that these people in their own minds have suffered and continue to suffer a grave psychic and sociological injury, which is that “their” country is being “stolen” from them. This is what all the wailing about how cases like Roe and Obergefell, along with the absolute opposition to laws like the Voting Rights Act, is ultimately all about. For Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett, and for hundreds of like-minded federal judges, America is a white supremacist country, and the Constitution is therefore a white supremacist document, and must at all times be interpreted to the extent possible — which is very considerable! — in the light of this fundamental underlying interpretive principle, which naturally includes all the other varieties of extreme cultural reaction (misogyny, money worship etc) that are integral to protecting white supremacy. Anything else is simply a theft of sovereignty from the [white] People.
I realize this sounds like hyperbole to the Guardians of the Guardrails, but I believe it to be quite literally the case, although of course the overwhelming majority of people who accept this interpretive principle would never phrase it that way publicly, and indeed have never phrased it that way to themselves, since doing so would contradict that one thing that Martin Luther King said in that one speech that one time.
But make no mistake about it: This is their credo. You can call that approach to interpreting America’s fundamental laws “lawless” if you like, but they of course consider the cases they treat as anathema as lawless, because those cases violate the true fundamental law, which is white supremacy, now and forever.
It’s hardly surprising that even the most mild and subtle hints of anything like this, which can be found in something like Jackson’s Callais dissent if you are fanatically dedicated to trying to detect such libels against the purity of your intentions, throw somebody like Alito into a rage.
A hit dog will holler as I believe Voltaire or Bear Bryant said.