Samuel Alito and the Donald Trump School of Self-Immolation

Not since 1974 when New Times magazine called Sen. William Scott (R-Va.) Congress’ dumbest member and he called a press conference in response to deny the charge and thereby prove mental deficiencies has a member of the Washington elite so mishandled a critical press salvo as Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. did this week.

Alito, who shares with Donald Trump a toddler’s lack of impulse control, once again demonstrated his inability to plan more than one move ahead at a time after the investigative news outfit ProPublica emailed a list of questions for its story pegged to his flight to a comped 2008 luxury fishing trip in Alaska on a hedge fund billionaire’s private jet.

As if to shout, “I’m not on trial here,” the justice declined to answer ProPublica’s questions, sending that message to the news organization through a court spokesperson. But in a contradictory move, Alito mounted a 1,200-word defense in the form of a Wall Street Journal op-ed to dispute ProPublica’s article — which had not yet been published. Essentially, the justice scooped the news outlet on its own story.

Alito had every right to sting ProPublica before it stung him. But in his case, getting out in front of the story before it published was a little like a judge delivering a verdict after hearing the charges but before the trial had taken place. For one thing, his dense-as-a-legal-brief argument was hard to follow because it lacked the connective tissue to explain what precisely ProPublica’s piece was accusing him of. A billboard mounted on a flatbed truck reading “ProPublica Is Being Mean to Me” and driven in a circle around the Supreme Court Building would have been a more effective public relations ploy. Perhaps the most blockheaded thing about Alito’s preemption was that it gave fresh publicity to the latest installment in a growing series about the justices licking sugar off the tummies of their sugar daddies.

Alito’s excuse-making was William Scott caliber but with a modern, Trumpian twist. While Alito wasn’t as incoherent as Trump was in his recent credibility-destroying appearance on Fox, the justice did himself no favors, even in an ostensibly friendly forum. Like Trump, he is not actually denying anything, just waving his hands. To wit: The seat he took on the private jet would have gone empty if he had not claimed it, he wrote. Yes, there was wine at the retreat, but it didn’t cost $1,000. He’d only spoken to his hedge fund benefactor “a handful of occasions,” and never about cases, Alito states in the Journal, as if that erases the onus of avoiding the appearance of conflict of interest. I’m half-surprised that in his self-defense, he didn’t also plead that he didn’t steal any bathroom towels from the lodge.

When the ProPublica story, “Justice Samuel Alito Took Luxury Fishing Vacation With GOP Billionaire Who Later Had Cases Before the Court,” landed Tuesday evening after the Alito hors d’oeuvre, the capital’s appetite was hyper-stimulated for the main course. Alito didn’t report the Alaska trip, in apparent violation of the law that requires members of the Supreme Court report most gifts. Also, the billionaire’s hedge fund came before the Supreme Court at least 10 times after the trip, ProPublica reports, and the outlet got several ethics cops to say Alito should have recused himself from these cases but didn’t.

Alito’s ProPublica blow-up is only his latest PR miscue. In April, he gave an interview with his allies at the Wall Street Journal editorial page in which he complained resentfully about the criticism leveled at the court. “We’re being bombarded with this,” Alito said. “Day in and day out,” he added, critics say of the court, “They’re illegitimate. They’re engaging in all sorts of unethical conduct.” Instead of accepting or battling the criticism, Alito chooses to whine. He didn’t exactly convene a press conference to say he’s not the dumbest member of the Supreme Court, but almost. He tells the Journal editorial page that the ethical complaints leveled at the justices, such as Clarence Thomas, “undermines confidence in the government.”

Savor that for a moment. The Supreme Court has, for the past 70 years, thrown down scores of thunderbolts of controversial decisions. Brown v. Board of Education. Bush v. Gore. Citizens United. Obergefell. Miranda. Roe v. Wade. Gideon. Times v. Sullivan. Bakke. Loving. On each occasion, spitballs and rotten fruit have rained down on the court. Remember the ’60s cry to “Impeach Earl Warren”? These days, not even the Vatican gets the bye that Alito seems to think is the court’s right. Do you want to know what would really undermine confidence in government? An environment in which nobody dared say anything nasty about the conduct of the Supremes because Samuel Alito might shriek about it. Essentially, Alito wants to get away with something a mere federal employee could get busted for and probably fired.

As somebody who makes his living pushing words around on a page that govern the conduct of hundreds of millions, Alito should have had a better rejoinder to the ProPublica article than his Journal prebuttal. Is it a lack of intelligence or an emotional deficiency that compels him to go off half-cocked like this? In the same Journal where he complained that ethical complaints — rather than the ethical violations themselves — were undermining government, Alito asserted, “I personally have a pretty good idea who is responsible” for the leak of a draft of the Dobbs decision to POLITICO, but declined to name names, because he didn’t have the level of proof required. In his view, the leak wasn’t just a leak but “part of an effort to prevent the Dobbs draft…from becoming the decision of the court.” [Ellipses in the original.] “And that’s how it was used for those six weeks by people on the outside — as part of the campaign to try to intimidate the court.”

Poor, poor, pitiful Sam. Report on the ethics of the justices, and in his view you’re undermining government. Report on how the court’s decisions are shaped, and you’re trying to intimidate it. Why, things have gotten so bad for the justices, to see it Alito’s way, that a guy can’t accept a plush vacation from people who do business with the court without being criticized for it. Such protestations could be dumber than anything William Scott ever said or did.

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Scott threatened to sue New Times for libel but then realized if he lost he’d have proved that he was the dumbest member of Congress. Who is the dumbest person on Capitol Hill? Send nominations to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. Say hello to my Blue Sky account, but follow Twitter feed for real posts. My Mastodon, Post, and Substack Notes accounts still exist, but barely. My RSS feed seeks to undermine government.