Alito calls threats since abortion ruling ‘quite disturbing’
Justice Samuel Alito said in a rare CBS News interview previewed ahead of Monday’s broadcast that he considers whether to retire every year at age 76, telling correspondent Jan Crawford he had weighed stepping down at the end of the high court’s term that concluded in June.
“I thought about” retiring at the end of the term, Alito said, adding: “It’s something that I think someone at my age has to think about.” He continued: “But I thought I could still make a valuable contribution – which is why I became a justice and a judge in the first place.” When Crawford observed that he would probably reconsider annually, Alito replied: “Yeah, I think I have to.”
Asked whether his deliberation might complicate Republican hopes of confirming a younger conservative replacement while the party controls the Senate, Alito told Crawford it was “too hard to predict” the political situation or “what any president might do with respect to a replacement.”
The interview comes about six months after Alito was treated for dehydration at a hospital following a Federalist Society dinner in Philadelphia on 20 March. A Supreme Court spokesperson said at the time that Alito returned to his Virginia home that night as planned and was back at work by 23 March. The episode nonetheless prompted commentary across the political spectrum about whether Alito — appointed by President George W. Bush in 2006 — would step down.
A vacancy would, in all likelihood, be filled by someone both younger and equally or more conservative than Alito — a fourth Trump appointee joining the three named during his first presidency: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. The three, together with Alito, Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice John Roberts, form a six-justice conservative supermajority that has frequently — though not always — ruled in favor of Trump’s administration. Thomas, 78, has also been the subject of retirement speculation; progressive groups have been bracing for the possibility that he could retire while Trump remains in office.
In a separate portion of the interview, Alito described the personal cost of his 2022 majority opinion striking down the federal right to abortion established nearly 50 years earlier in Roe v. Wade. The decision was disapproved by nearly six in 10 Americans, according to polling by the Pew Research Center.
Alito said he had endured “the loss of old friendships” as well as “physical threats and harassment” since the ruling. He said overturning Roe required “courage” from him and the four justices who joined his opinion — Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett and Thomas. Lost friendships were “something you have to live with,” he said, because “part of the job that you are going to displease people by making decisions on controversial matters.”
Threats and harassment, however, were “quite disturbing” as well as “a danger for the courts and … others in public life,” Alito said, language that echoed rare July testimony before the US House by Barrett and her liberal colleague Elena Kagan as they made the case for upgraded Supreme Court security. Barrett and Kagan said a rise in threats had increasingly affected the justices’ personal and family lives. A would-be assassin carrying weapons and zip ties was arrested near Kavanaugh’s home in 2022 after word leaked that the court would overturn Roe.
Alito also said he believed “very harsh criticism” by Trump, Biden and other presidents could be “quite damaging” to the Supreme Court. He insisted the court’s job was to interpret the US Constitution “as best we can” while rejecting the notion that it had become a political institution. “We are not part of any political movement,” Alito said. “And we are not attempting to further any political agenda.”
The interview coincides with the release of Alito’s memoir, “So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court and Our Country,” set for Tuesday. In late September, Alito recused himself from a major climate change case amid scrutiny over his stock holdings in oil companies.