LOL, SHELDON WHITEHOUSE: New Supreme Court Scandal: ‘Improper Opining’: Sheldon Whitehouse sees a conspiracy in a Journal interview with Justice Samuel Alito.
We thought we’d seen everything, but here’s a new one: Justice Samuel Alito stands accused of the grave offense of “improper opining.”
That’s the bizarre charge leveled Monday by Senator Ahab, er, Sheldon Whitehouse, in a letter to Chief Justice John Roberts. The Rhode Island Democrat wants the Chief Justice to investigate Associate Justice Alito for saying things the Senator doesn’t like.
Mr. Whitehouse is famous for publicly examining Brett Kavanaugh’s high-school yearbook for subtle messages of, well, we never could figure it out. And now he says Justice Alito committed “improper opining on a legal issue that may come before the court” in his recent interview with this newspaper.
Mr. Whitehouse writes in his letter that “during the interview, Justice Alito stated that ‘[n]o provision in the Constitution gives [Congress] the authority to regulate the Supreme Court—period.’” The Senator says this is improper because the “comments appeared in connection” to his Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal and Transparency Act. Since the Supreme Court might someday rule on that legislation, the Senator says Justice Alito has violated judicial ethics.
This is nonsense even by Mr. Whitehouse’s standards. Justice Alito wasn’t opining on a case heading to the Court, or on Mr. Whitehouse’s legislation, which hasn’t passed the Senate and may never become law or the subject of litigation. The Justice was expressing his opinion on the general question of Congress’s power to regulate the Supreme Court.
This is no violation of Supreme Court obligations, and if it is then Justice Elena Kagan did the same when she also recently opined on Congress’s power to regulate the Court. Mr. Whitehouse’s letter doesn’t mention Justice Kagan’s comments, perhaps because they differed somewhat with Justice Alito’s. The point is that neither Justice did anything wrong in offering an opinion about the Constitution, Congress and the Court.
The Supreme Court will be smeared with help from a compliant media as long as it fails to toe the line.