WASHINGTON — Republican-appointed Justice Samuel Alito heartily defended the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed a national right to abortion, and lamented the death threats that ensued at the time.
Alito, who authored the 2022 landmark Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, hailed it as a textbook case of interpreting the Constitution as it is written rather than projecting one’s personal beliefs on the law.
“I know this is very controversial, but I thought it was perfectly clear that the reference to liberty in the 14th Amendment adopted in 1868 did not mean that there is a constitutional right to abortion,” Alito told “Fox News Sunday” in a prerecorded interview.
“In 1868, abortion was illegal in most of the states,” he added. “And so it is unthinkable that those states would ratify an amendment that rendered their own laws unconstitutional and then continue to have those laws on the books for decades after that.”
“I think there, originalism provided a clear answer.”
Alito, who is widely regarded as the most conservative Supreme Court justice next to Clarence Thomas, is a disciple of originalism, the legal philosophy of interpreting the Constitution and laws by the text and how its meaning would’ve been understood at the time it was written.
He has frequently characterized himself as a “practical originalist,” though more recently he’s opted to describe himself as a “working judicial originalist” who is wary of academic originalism becoming too pure.
The associate justice did a brief media tour ahead of the Supreme Court’s start of the new term on Monday to promote his new book, “So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country.”
In the Dobbs decision, Alito tore into legal precedents that began with Roe v. Wade, finding that the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed a fundamental right to privacy, which meant that women had the right to obtain abortion nationally.
As Alito noted in the Dobbs opinion, the text of the Constitution made no mention of abortion or a right to privacy. His opinion returned the issue of abortion to Congress and the states.
But before that opinion dropped, a draft of it was leaked to Politico in May 2022, weeks before the Supreme Court formally handed it down.
During that time, justices in the majority opinion faced a torrent of death threats.
“That was totally unprecedented in the history of the country,” Alito said of the leak. “It was a grave breach of the trust that everybody who worked in this building had before that point.
“And it very predictably made the five of us in the majority targets for assassination and nearly resulted in the assassination of my colleague Brett Kavanaugh.”
Nicholas Roske, a California sicko, had shown up to Republican appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home in June of 2022 armed to the teeth in an apparent assassination plot that was foiled.
Republican-appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett later recounted how she had to explain to her children why she was wearing a bulletproof vest after the Dobbs leak.
Alito revealed that he has a theory on who leaked the Dobbs decision, but said the “evidence available at this time is not strong enough” to identify that individual.
The associate justice also bemoaned the increased politicization of the Supreme Court.
“I do think there is a concerted effort to intimidate the court and justices on the court, try to influence us to decide cases differently from the way in which we have been deciding them,” he reflected.
At one point during the wide-ranging interview, Alito remarked that the onslaught of lockdown policies implemented during COVID-19 was “a stress test of our constitutional rights.”
“And one of the things that, unfortunately, it disclosed was that many people were willing to downgrade certain constitutional rights, the right to freedom of speech and the right to the free exercise of religion in particular,” he lamented.
He gave an example of how casinos in Las Vegas allowed people to go without masks, while houses of worship had severe limits on attendance.
