By Chris Satullo

As a Supreme Court justice, I’m sure Samuel Alito spends a fair amount of his time reading learned journals. Apparently, though, The American Psychologist and Ad Week are not among them.

Alito seems remarkably ill-informed about how the human mind actually works, particularly when it comes to bias, affinity and succumbing to the subtle arts of marketing. Either that, or he is precisely the arrogant, angry, self-righteous, bullshit-spewing hypocrite I think he is.

Alito is the second justice this year to receive deserved negative scrutiny from the splendid Pro Publica investigative journalism team. Pro Publica just reported that Alito accepted a private plane ride to a lavish Alaska fishing trip from a billionaire, never disclosed it on the court’s (incredibly weak) ethics forms, then didn’t recuse himself when that same rich guy’s hedge fund was involved in a Supreme Court case worth billions of dollars.  

Not long ago, Pro Publica also reported that one of Alito’s main reactionary compadres on the court, Clarence Thomas, hadn’t disclosed an even more lavish roster of trips, gifts and favors from another billionaire. At least, in Thomas’ case, that billionaire’s largesse seems to have been motivated more by genuine friendship and admiration for the justice than by obvious trawling for influence.

Alito offered a “pre-buttal” to the ProPublica article that the Wall Street Journal editorial page – ever-accommodating to right-wing poobahs – helpfully published for him. It did so verbatim and without fact-checking, even before the investigative piece was posted on the Web. 

In his huffy apologia, Alito insisted he hadn’t known who was comping him that posh private plane trip to the wilds of the 49th state – as though that was exonerating, rather than shockingly lax.  

He also maintained that, later on, he hadn’t known that his benefactor’s hedge fund was involved in a celebrated court case from which he failed to recuse himself.

Right. 

Here, Alito is…wait, what’s the word for it? Oh yeah: L-Y-I-N-G.

As court-watcher Dahlia Lithwick said in Slate this week, even her cats knew that Alito’s billionaire, Paul Singer, was driving that lavishly-covered lawsuit vs. an entire sovereign nation (Argentina).  

Confronted with the fact that he’d unethically joined the majority that gave Singer a multibillion-dollar victory in the suit, Alito sounded like a bored cop shooing onlookers away from the yellow tape around a crime scene: Nothing to see here, move along, nothing to see.

Perhaps, sadly, we are getting a belated explanation for some recent, mysterious Supreme Court rulings on political corruption cases. The court, in overturning guilty verdicts from lower courts, has set a naive and impossible standard for determining influence peddling: Prosecutors had to prove a direct quid-pro-quo i.e. this donation, gift or favor was explicitly and directly rewarded with this regulatory action or that vote.

Anybody who knows anything about how political corruption really works knows that is the case only when the parties involved are incredibly stupid.

Now, the Thomas and Alito situations suggest an alternative explanation to naivete: The justices were looking to justify and protect their own grifts.

Alito’s screed in the Journal is a tour-de-force in missing the point:

The seat on the plane would otherwise have been empty. Great, bravo, you didn’t bump Mother Teresa from the junket. Next time, how about trying Expedia?

I didn’t discuss cases with Mr. Singer. You really should read The American Psychologist or Ad Week more often, Sam. That’s not how influence works; that’s not how unconscious biases form. It’s powerful human nature to feel more kindly toward people who treat you well and express admiration for you. It takes a rigorous and consistent mental and emotional discipline to recognize your own biases and prevent them from shading your judgment and shaping your work. And this next statement of yours in the Journal shows that, about that, you have not a clue:

“It was and is my judgment that these facts would not cause a reasonable and unbiased person to doubt my ability to decide the matters in question impartially.”  

Whoa, Nelly. Here’s the whole point of ethics laws, disclosure forms and recusal rules: We don’t wantto leave such decisions solely up to the person who is getting the favored treatment. And may I remind you, old pal, that you did not disclose the trip, so there was no way for the “reasonable and unbiased person” to assess your impartiality towards Singer’s hedge fund. Until Pro Publica blew the whistle, that is. Now, your failure to disclose would lead most reasonable people to conclude you were hiding something. Also, the author of the Dobbs abortion decision, with his blinkered self-love, arrogating to himself the right to judge what all reasonable and unbiased people might think about him is…astonishing.

Each Supreme Court justice is one of the 10 most powerful people in American democracy – nine justices along with one president. Their power dwarfs that of any member of Congress; a law that a senator struggled five years to get enacted, compromising all along the away, can be wiped away with one stroke of a justice’s pen. 

What’s more, absent gross malfeasance, justices have the job for life. Their current salaries are $274,200 a year, in taxpayer dollars (with the chief justice getting a little supplement). They have great health care and huge staffs of Ivy League grads eager to do the first drafts of all their work. They get their entire summers off – during which they can tootle around the world making more money giving speeches, teaching classes etc.

For all this power and privilege we grant you, Sam, we are owed transparency, accountability and far more rigorous ethics than you seem to feel like adhering to.

Instead, you fling at us this age-old false syllogism:

•   People in my job are supposed to be impartial.
•   I have this job.
• Therefore, I am impartial.

Uh, no. 

I’m familiar with the appeal of this false reasoning. I heard it from and had to train it out of any number of young people who worked for me over the years. Most of my life I worked in a constitutionally privileged profession that holds a public trust. This demands that its practitioners uphold transparency, accountability and rigorous ethics.

I was a newspaper and digital journalist.

Stop snickering.  

I know modern media and partisan ideology tend to view reporters as sniveling weasels who would betray their grandmothers to get clicks. I’ve been out of newsrooms for eight years now, so maybe it’s all gone to pieces since.

But I can assure you of this: In the three newsrooms where I worked – and often ran things – during my career, here was the iron rule about accepting any form of gift or favor from anyone outside of family and lifelong friends:

Don’t. Ever.  Don’t even think about it. 

I’m not saying no one ever broke the rule. I’m saying the organizations where I worked were dead serious about it. We never, ever, wanted to do anything that could give reason for friend or foe to doubt we were doing our absolute best to be an honest broker, to call it as fairly and accurately as we could.  

This went far beyond actual conflict of interest. That, we tried zealously to avoid, but when it did arise, we aimed to be fully transparent about it while keeping any staffers with actual conflicts far away from the work on that particular story.  Most of our concern was about the mere appearance of conflict, which we knew over time could erode trust in our reporting. Also, the wiser heads in the room knew that winking at the appearance of conflict would build a complacency that could slide over time into real bias and conflict of interest.

At the Philadelphia Inquirer, where I worked for 20 years, this was how strict the ethical culture was: Review copies of books were not to go home with a staffer; they were to be boxed up and donated to a library. If political reporters covered a party fund-raiser and ate the food, they were supposed to find out the actual cost of the meal, which the paper would reimburse to the organizer.

So, Sam, here’s what I feel I need to say to you:

Even at my career peak, my salary never came within hailing distance of yours. I wrote my own first drafts. We were on my wife’s health benefits, because the paper’s kinda sucked. And I certainly didn’t get summers off. I gave lots of talks and speeches and rarely if ever took an honorarium; I asked that they be donated to charity. 

(For a long while, I funneled that dough to a college scholarship fund named after a reporter friend of mine who died tragically young. One time a top editor at my paper tried to tell me I couldn’t do even that ethically – because supporting the scholarship fund had meaning for me. That, I thought, was wackily extreme and I ignored him, but I did sort of respect his puritanical rigor.)

Yet I, a scruffy, ink-stained, contemptible scribe, still somehow managed regularly to turn down gifts and favors, and never hesitated to disclose conflicts or recuse when appropriate. So, Sam, here’s some advice for you:  

Pay for your own effing plane rides and salmon fishing licenses. 

You can afford it, but the Supreme Court’s already tattered credibility cannot afford your arrogant laxness. And if, sadly, some future junket is just too juicy for you to pass up, at least have the decency to disclose and recuse. If those small sacrifices are too much for you to bear, then, for the love of James Madison, just resign.

Or we’ll simply have to impeach your sorry, arrogant behind.

—

Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia