Shawn Fleetwood of the Federalist marks one significant U.S. Supreme Court anniversary.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito just hit a major milestone in his judicial career. On Saturday, the Bush appointee marked his 20th anniversary as a justice on the highest court in the land.
Since joining SCOTUS, Alito has been a staunch and reliable originalist, authoring some of the court’s most significant decisions of the 21st century. …
… During an interview with the Hoover Institution’s Peter Robinson last year, Alito affirmed that it’s the duty of all judges to ignore the politics of the day and instead focus on properly adhering to the Constitution — even if doing so may yield an unpopular result.
“We are not supposed to do what is popular, we’re supposed to do what is right. We’re supposed to interpret the Constitution and figure out what it means and then apply the Constitution,” Alito said. “We’re basically a democratic country, but the framers want to put some restraint on things that people might do during a particular area because they’re caught up in the emotions that are triggered by the events of the day. So, we have to stand firm on this, and I think we have done a pretty good job on it, but we have to keep it up because challenges will … continue to come.”
When the Supreme Court dismissed a legal challenge to the Biden administration’s collusion with Big Tech to censor Americans in Murthy v. Missouri (2024), it was Alito who offered a full-throated defense of these challengers’ free speech rights.
Writing for the dissent, the Bush appointee chastised the majority for failing to recognize the “blatantly unconstitutional” nature of the government’s Big Tech censorship scheme. …
… “Freedom of speech serves many valuable purposes, but its most important role is protection of speech that is essential to democratic self-government … and speech that advances humanity’s store of knowledge, thought, and expression in fields such as science, medicine, history, the social sciences, philosophy, and the arts,” Alito wrote.
