Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has offered a cryptic observation about his former colleague and mentor, the late conservative justice Antonin Scalia.
Scalia, who was appointed to the bench in 1986 and became one of its most influential conservative members, died unexpectedly in his sleep at age 79, in early 2016.
After his death, Alito—who has served on the Supreme Court since 2006—continued Scalia’s judicial legacy by authoring the Dobbs v. Jackson decision overturning the constitutional right to an abortion.
His decision drew heavily from dissents that Scalia had authored in previous cases upholding the right to an abortion, Alito told journalist and author James Rosen in a new interview published in Politico.
But while Scalia would have no doubt been happy that the court now boasts an entrenched 6-3 conservative majority, he would have been less enthusiastic about the state of American politics, which have grown “coarser and more polarized than ever before,” Rosen wrote.
“He would have been appalled at so much,” Alito told Rosen.
The 75-year-old did not elaborate, though he apparently agreed with one of Scalia’s children that the timing of the justice’s death meant he was spared from witnessing “so much that would have upset him,” as Rosen put it.
A few months after Scalia died, President Donald Trump was named the presumptive Republican nominee.
Trump went on to win the general election in November and appoint Scalia’s successor, Neil Gorsuch, after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell kept the seat vacant for more than a year in order to prevent President Barack Obama from filling it.
Since then, the court has been rocked by a series of scandals, including Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s disastrous confirmation hearings in 2018, during which Christine Blasey Ford accused him of sexual assault, which he denied.
A few years later, in 2022, a draft version of Alito’s decision in Dobbs was leaked to Politico. If the leak came up during Rosen’s 90-minute interview with Alito, the author didn’t mention it.
Subsequent leaks have revealed disagreements among the justices, including a bitter debate over the court’s toothless ethics rules, and a confidential memo in which Chief Justice John Roberts pushed to grant Trump broad immunity from prosecution.
The court is also facing record-low public trust as Alito and the other conservative justices have greenlit the vast majority of Trump’s policies, while the justices themselves face unprecedented security risks.
“Even since Nino died, things are so different,” Alito told Rosen, using a nickname for Scalia reserved for close friends and family. “I so often wish he were still here. He started so much and it would have been good to have him around to see it to completion.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Supreme Court for comment.
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