Alito, Alabama, and the Supreme Court’s fall

August is a month when media folks can hit the beach or jet around Europe because nothing ever happens. Except for Richard Nixon’s resignation, Hiroshima, the Watts riots, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the death of Marilyn Monroe, the Gulf of Tonkin, Woodstock, the Berlin Wall crisis, MLK’s ”I Have a Dream” speech, and the crash that killed Princess Diana. I don’t know about you, but I’m not going anywhere anytime soon!

📮 Israel has always been a sensitive political subject, so I was a little surprised at the near unanimity of opinion about continuing U.S. aid with the extreme right turn of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government: a resounding “No!” Wrote reader Cheryl Forte: “Unfortunately it seems Israel is soon to become an autocracy under Netanyahu and [in my humble opinion] that should disqualify them for foreign aid, unless the US can use ending that aid to pressure Netanyahu to stop his march to authoritarian rule.” But one dissenter was Frank Brodky, who noted that the dollars largely benefit U.S. defense contractors. “By cancelling this aid, thousands of jobs would be lost here,” he wrote.

This week’s question: As noted below, children (and some grown-ups) of the 1980s are mourning the passing of Sinead O’Connor and Paul Reubens. What recent celebrity death was the most gutting for you? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.

America’s political crisis of rising authoritarianism on the right is escalating, dramatically. Over the weekend, I wrote about the major effort by the think-tank “braintrust” of Donald Trump’s GOP called Project 2025. It aims to “dismantle the administrative state” — that’s their fancy term for creating a dictatorship — including an unconditional surrender on fighting climate change. But the rubber of autocracy is already hitting the road at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Late last week, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. — the author of 2022′s notorious decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and nearly 50 years of reproductive rights in America, and also the world’s worst Phillies fan — poured gasoline on the raging ethical scandals at the High Court with an outrageous assertion of unlimited power for him and his fellow justices.

“No provision in the Constitution gives them [Congress] the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period,” Alito told the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, with whom he’s had an unusually close, and uncritical, relationship. “If we’re viewed as illegitimate, then disregard of our decisions becomes more acceptable and more popular.”

Of course, the crisis of illegitimacy that Alito alluded to was actually brought on by the High Court itself — the willingness of Alito and the other justices to accept luxury travel and other perks from billionaires or special-interest groups with a mostly conservative agenda. Indeed, Alito has come under increasing fire for two such trips, including his 2022 outing to Italy to speak and be feted at an ornate castle, paid for by a conservative legal group that had filed briefs seeking to reverse Roe.

That’s where Alito’s alarm about Congress comes in. Some lawmakers — including Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, the most forceful critic of the jurists’ ethical morass — are backing legislation that would require the Supreme Court to follow the lead of lower-level federal judges and adopt a basic code of ethics. This modest reform — which nonetheless faces a high hurdle in the obstructionist GOP-led House — doesn’t go nearly as far as some other radical changes proposed recently, such as term limits and/or expanding the court.

Yet even this middling congressional mandate is a bridge too far for the imperious Alito.

The New Jersey-born justice’s comments are both outrageous and a tad ridiculous. For one thing, they reveal that a man that we pay $244,793 a year to interpret the U.S. Constitution lacks a basic understanding of that document. In Article I, Section 8, Clause 18, the Constitution grants Congress the power “To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers” of the government, including the judicial branch. In fact, the Supreme Court seat (Associate Justice 8) that Alito now occupies was created by Congress — exercising those powers — when it voted in 1837 to expand the court from seven members to nine. The irony is almost painful.

But the implication of Alito’s remark is much more alarming than those blind spots. American democracy can only work in a true system of checks and balances that restrains power grabs from any of the three branches — executive, legislative, and judicial. Recent decades have shown the justices have accumulated increasing power to interpret both new laws and our basic rights — as seen most recently with the reversals of abortion rights and affirmative action. Any check on that power — to impeach a wayward justice, set the court’s budget, or regulate its actions — must come from Congress.

In denying that reality, Alito is proposing a High Court not of principled and modest jurists, but kings and queens, ruling on the law while living above it. He seeks the very tyrannical powers that the new Americans rebelled against in 1775.

But last week also revealed a big picture that’s even more insidious. It’s no secret that control of the judicial branch, and especially the Supreme Court, has been the central project of the conservative movement for roughly a half century. In that context, the wooing of justices like Alito and the scandal-scarred Clarence Thomas — the billionaire-flavored trips and other perks paid for by wealthy right-wingers or their special-interest groups — must be viewed as a feature, not a bug. The payoff has been the 2020s surge of rulings to uphold the patriarchy, white supremacy, and unregulated capitalism and wealth. The downside: Public trust in the High Court has never been lower.

The just-ended 2022-23 term included some high-profile conservative rulings — student loans, affirmative action, the right of businesses to discriminate against the LGBTQ community — but also a few surprises. Some court watchers feel that Chief Justice John Roberts, as concerned with the jurists’ legitimacy as much as his pro-business ideology, worked on fellow GOP appointee Brett Kavanaugh to create occasional alliances with the liberal justices. None was more jarring to conservatives than a June ruling that not only affirmed the 1965 Voting Rights Act but ordered Alabama to redraw its congressional map to create a second, majority Black district in the state.

Alabama’s response reeked of 1963 and the segregationist George Wallace’s stand in the schoolhouse door. Its legislature met, a slightly different map was approved, and Gov. Kay Ivey signed it into law — even though the map did not create a new, viable district for a Black candidate as the judges had mandated. This was a modern take on “massive resistance,” defying the authority of the federal government’s highest court to deny rights to Black citizens.

Which goes back to Alito’s comments about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. The authoritarian right did want a conservative-majority Supreme Court — but what it really wants is to win, by any means necessary. They have molded the court into one that is largely pliant, yet also weak and widely disrespected. That gives their reactionary movement a judiciary that gives it most of what it wants — and can be openly defied the rare times it does not. It’s a rigged game — guaranteed to produce the desired results for the white male hierarchies that made the rules.

It’s fascinating to see these supreme courts at the center of the fight to save or destroy democracy — both in the United States and in Israel. The battle being waged in the streets of Tel Aviv looks to be a mirror image, since pro-democracy marchers want to prevent excessive parliamentary power over their highest court. But in reality, both fights are about stopping unchecked tyranny. It’s just that in Israel, the vehicle for dictatorship is the extreme-right parliament. In America, it would be Alito’s star chamber, unaccountable and appointed for life. The other difference is that when Americans finally flood the streets in protest, it might be too late.

When I started thinking seriously around 2019 about the book idea that became After the Ivory Tower Falls, its central premise seemed like a bit of a stretch. College as the key fault line dividing America in two? Seriously? But in the intervening four years, a lot has changed. The core issues in the book that finally came out one year ago — who goes to college, why it costs so much, and what to do about about that $1.75 trillion mountain of debt — have moved to the front burner. Going into 2024, the college/non-college split in the electorate is wider than ever. If you’ve waited to read my tome, I have good news. The paperback edition of After the Ivory Tower Falls — hopefully a few bucks cheaper, and easier to lug to the beach — comes out TODAY. I’d be much flattered if you considered it for a late-summer read.

Timing is everything, I guess. In 2017, there was no bigger and more compelling story than the investigative reporting of the New York Times’ Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, which exposed the long-running sex crimes of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein and won them a Pulitzer Prize. But in such a fast-moving world, by the time the inevitable film — She Said, based on their book — came out, it was greeted with a societal yawn. (Deadline Hollywood blamed the collective exhaustion of the audience for its dismal $13 million box-office take.) Many folks, myself included, said they might stream it later. This weekend, I did exactly that on Amazon Prime, and I’d urge you to do the same. It’s not only a riveting, fast-moving yarn — with great performances from Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan — but it feels more poignant now, knowing that the walls around powerful men are being reconstructed as you read this.

Question: Do you see any possibility for more indictments in the next two months, and if so, for whom? Tfg’s offspring? Members of Congress or Senate? — (Via Anthe Rhodes-Liuzzo (@AntheRhodes) on Twitter

Answer: Thanks, Anthe (and that was a remarkable story about your late mother-in-law and Tony Bennett, but I digress). Regarding Trump, I’m getting indictment fatigue already and the big one hasn’t even happened yet. That said, for all the hours of blather on TV, there’s been too little talk on who else might be going down with the ship. I’d look closely at Trump lawyers (or legal advisers) John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, and of course Rudy Giuliani. Did former chief of staff Mark Meadows make a deal? What about two figures who felt central to the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection — Roger Stone and Michael Flynn — who were pardoned by Trump for their other crimes? As for lawmakers, culpability is hard to pin down — but Sen. Lindsey Graham is at risk for his election phone calls to Georgia.

“What are you rebelling against?” a girl asks Marlon Brando in 1953′s The Wild One. “Whaddya got?” was his classic response for a rising generation where it seemed everybody was a rebel, sometimes without a cause, and sometimes with a lot of them, from Vietnam to Selma. After Nov. 4, 1980, and the launch of the so-called “Reagan Revolution,” everything changed. Sure, there were folks who protested the nuclear bomb or government indifference to AIDS, but the much stronger vibe was the teeth-clenched conformity of “Just Say No.” Challenging the status quo could cause a loss of income, or social heartburn. Living with the tag of “rebel” was suddenly an act of courage.

In the past week, the world lost two unforgettable non-conformists who exploded like supernovas during those 1980s: the Irish rock singer Sinead O’Connor and the subversive comedian Paul Reubens, whose success came performing for kids and clued-in grown-ups as “Pee Wee Herman.” They each found their own radically different modes of expression. Reubens’ rebellion was usually just below the surface, at a frequency aimed at evading (with mixed results) the era’s “thought police.” He was non-political yet highly political — committed to diverse casting, telling Newsday in 1989 that his goal with Saturday morning’s Pee Wee’s Playhouse was to be “entertaining and to transmit some subliminal messages, like nonconformity isn’t bad.”

That was a message that Sinead O’Connor had already absorbed. Bursting onto the alt-rock scene with 1987′s “Mandinka,” she had a No. 1 U.S. hit in 1990 with her cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” and could have trod down a well-worn road of bland pop stardom. But too much burned inside of her from her troubled childhood, her repressive time in reformatory and her bad experiences with Catholicism. In 1992, she ended a performance on Saturday Night Live by ripping the church for child sex abuse, then literally ripping up a photo of Pope John Paul II. She remained popular in Europe but was all but blackballed in America — even as time proved the truth of every word she said.

It seems to me they lived their lives like candles in the wind. Reubens persisted even as he was hounded for his peccadillos, while O’Connor’s mental-health struggles only intensified. Reubens died Monday at 70, after a six-year battle with cancer. O’Connor was just 56, cause of death unknown. They left the world in a time of online hate, public homophobia, climate denial, and worse. We need a new army of rebels, and we just lost two of the best.

The late John Timoney, the Philadelphia police chief at the turn of the millennium who passed away in 2016, was a complicated man. The Irish-born top cop was great at PR and shmoozing, OK at fighting crime, and awful on civil liberties and dealing with protests. In the year after the Arab Spring, I was appalled when Timoney was hired by the oil-rich tyrants of Bahrain seeking to preserve their dictatorship. Especially after human-rights groups slammed the regime for its use of tear gas. I wrote: “No one is making the case that Timoney is promoting these activities, but he was brought in to clean things up. Clearly, he’s not — and he ought to resign. The bigger problem is this — we’re Americans, and I was taught growing up that we support democracy and oppose kings. Why is John Timoney working on the wrong side?” Read the rest from 11 years ago in, “The latest on Philly’s ‘Bahrain Man’.”

I’ve been turning my focus toward the life or death stakes in the 2024 presidential race. In my Sunday column, I looked at the steady rise of conspiracy theories in American politics — with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the avatar of horse manure — to speculate that the coming year will be remembered as “the Unreality Election,” with a nation divided right down the middle between fact voters and fantasy voters. Over the weekend, I drilled into arguably the most alarming aspect of this bizarre election: An elaborate conservative scheme to surrender on climate change and restore power to Big Oil. The fate of the earth will be on the ballot.

The Inquirer isn’t the biggest or the best-known newsroom in America, but somehow we remain a magnet for the best people in journalism. There is no better feature writer, anywhere, than Jason Nark, who specializes in finding stories of nature and surviving hardship. He may have met his ultimate subject in 43-year-old Christy Hyman, who found birding as an outlet after the death of her son. “When you see a bird, you focus on something seemingly pure and untouched from the worries of life, but this bird, at every single moment is trying to survive, to not be eaten,” she told Nark at the John Heinz Wildlife Refuge. “You start rooting for their survival.” The survival of news orgs like The Inquirer is what gives journalists like Nark a home to tell these remarkable tales. Please support this by subscribing.