The Company They Keep
Before Lyndon Johnson nominated him to the Supreme Court, Abe Fortas was Johnson's lawyer and friend. That does not excuse the role that Fortas continued to play as a confidante of Johnson when considerations of judicial ethics and separation of powers ought to have led him to keep the president at arm's length or at least to keep their discussions to matters that did not implicate their respective day jobs. Likewise, Antonin Scalia was friends with Dick Cheney before they became a Supreme Court Justice and Vice President, respectively. Even so, although I agreed that Scalia was not technically required to recuse himself from a case involving the Vice President after a duck-hunting trip they took together, Scalia's behavior and defense thereof were tone-deaf.
That said, we can understand how Fortas wanted to keep up his friendship with Johnson, and Scalia his friendship with Cheney. People who attain power remain people with bonds of friendship that can be painful to sever or even weaken. But the patrons and sycophants who shower favors on a jurist or politician only after the latter has achieved power ought--to a person with judgment--to be rebuffed.
Harlan Crow met and befriended Clarence Thomas in 1996, after Thomas was already a Supreme Court Justice. And we have now learned that Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis only recently befriended Samuel Alito.
Alito's friendship with Princess Gloria came to light when he reported that he had received concert tickets valued at $900 from her. That probably understates the benefits Alito received, as he was also a guest at Gloria's palace. Even so, by contrast with the Crow/Thomas relationship, there does not seem to be serious cause for concern that the shower of riches from Gloria keeps Alito on the bench. (The best account of the corruption in the Crow/Thomas relationship is not that Crow buys Thomas's votes, which would be reactionary in any event, but that he funds Thomas's lifestyle, so that Thomas can remain on the bench rather than succumbing to the temptation to retire and cash in.)
Still, even if Princess Gloria is not directly or even indirectly corrupting Alito, a Justice who was remotely interested in appearing to stand apart from extremist politics would be wary of keeping company with her. According to the princess, she was drawn to Alito by the fact "that he’s a judge who is pro-life . . . .” That is admirably honest. The princess did not say that Alito properly understands the role of a judge in a democracy, or that he read the Constitution in accordance with its original meaning, or any of the other familiar nominally ideologically neutral grounds offered in the Dobbs opinion or elsewhere for eliminating a constitutional right to abortion. Nope. The princess just came right out and said what everyone knows: Justice Alito interprets the law in an anti-abortion manner because Alito opposes abortion.
If that sort of frankness should create some awkwardness for Alito, the basis for Princess Gloria's anti-abortion stance should be downright embarrassing for the Justice. The NY Times article I linked above describes Gloria's attraction to Alito as running through their shared Catholicism. I am dubious. While I do not agree with the Catholic view that zygotes and embryos (as opposed to late-term and thus sentient fetuses) are entitled to moral respect, that is certainly a moral position that can be described in polite company. But it's not how the princess herself describes her opposition to abortion--which she grounds in natalism and racism. Here's the key language from the Times story:
“The only thing that I care about in politics is that somebody is fighting abortion and helping reproduction rates go up,” [Princess Gloria] said in the interview. “I think that killing our own offspring and reducing our reproduction rates, eventually, we will kill our own kind.”
Thus, Gloria's opposition to the abortion (of white and especially German embryos and fetuses) is inextricably linked to her far-right opposition to immigration. One need not infer any of that. It's right out in the open. As the Times story notes, Princess Gloria admires Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban and "invited the far-right German politician Maximilian Krah to sit in the front row with her for a performance of 'Carmen' at a music festival she hosted. In addition, "[s]he is longtime friends with the Trump ally Stephen K. Bannon . . . ."
What are we to make of the fact that none of this seems to trouble Samuel Alito? My main takeaway is that it reflects the nearly complete Trumpification of American conservatism. Yes, Liz Cheney, George Conway, and other deeply conservative never-Trumpers exist. So too, there is a long list of deeply conservative figures who served in the Trump administration and, having witnessed his ignorance, venality, stupidity, pettiness, vindictiveness, authoritarianism, and profound lack of appreciation for norms of human decency, much less government, have endorsed Kamala Harris for President. But viewed in broader perspective, they are outliers. The overwhelming majority of conservatives embrace Trumpism. That includes legal elites.
I doubt that J.D. Vance was spouting great-replacement-theory racism when, as a Yale Law student, he still had liberal friends. I don't know whether Justice Alito is himself a nativist and natalist, but the fact that he unabashedly keeps company with one (and perhaps many more) tells us that positions that just a few years ago would have marked a public figure as a dangerous right-wing extremist are now mainstream for conservatives, including conservative elites.