Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has not retired, nor does he expect to anytime soon—despite what turned out to be an erroneous NPR report in June.
“Obviously I’m here for another term,” Alito, 76, declared in an interview with The Wall Street Journal published Friday, just one month after he completed his 20th full term on the nation’s highest court. He did, however, concede that there’s pressure to retire.
Such nudges are “not pleasant,” Alito noted, “in the sense that it’s a reminder of mortality. It’s like, what are those vultures doing up there? They are flying around. But it goes with life tenure.”
The biggest criticism of the deeply conservative justice’s controversial opinions is that he’s simply rubber-stamping President Donald Trump’s policies, regardless of what the Constitution demands.
Alito and his conservative cohort, Clarence Thomas, dissented from all three major Supreme Court decisions Trump lost: those challenging the independence of the Federal Reserve, those upholding limits on Trump’s ability to unilaterally institute tariffs, and the one banning birthright citizenship.
Yet Alito insisted to the Journal: “I vote in every case the way I think the case should be decided. If that means a high correlation with what Trump wants, fine. If it means zero correlation with what Trump wants, fine as well.”
Alito also emphasized that he has never ruled one way in some cases and another way in others simply to create the appearance of objectivity—so that “people will say, ‘Well, he’s objective, because sometimes he favors this side and other times he favors that side.’” Instead, he said, “I’m going to decide them all the way that I think they should be decided. People can agree, people can disagree.”
It may seem straightforward now, but Alito’s former high school English teacher, Elaine Tarr—who was quoted in Peter Canellos’ book, Revenge for the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement—was surprised by what turned out to be Alito’s conservative bent.
“Sam had a strong moral compass,” Tarr said. “That’s what I believed at the time—he was straight and narrow. I think he had a sense of right and wrong. Where Sam has picked up all of these ideas now, you’ve got me... How has he become this ultra, ultra conservative?”
“He was very responsible, made sure everything was on the dotted line,” Tarr continued. “Even his penmanship was very well formed. There was nothing sloppy about it. He was very methodical, very methodical. Does that equate with rigidity? I’m not going to answer that one. How flexible a thinker was he? I’m not sure about that either.”
When confronted with Tarr’s quotes, Alito told the Journal that her observations were “news to me.”
“She was a very good teacher, and she did make an important contribution to my education by urging me to read more broadly,” he said. “So I won’t say anything. I didn’t know that she had said that, and I didn’t know that her views about me had changed in that way.”
Alito may have been surprised by his former teacher’s assessment. But Tarr’s description of the methodical, “straight and narrow” student she once knew lands rather differently after two decades of watching him help move the Supreme Court sharply to the right.
