Congress’ dumbest member and he called a press conference in response to deny the charge and thereby prove mental deficiencies has a member of the Washington elite so mishandled a critical press salvo as Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. did this week.
Alito, who shares with Donald Trump a toddler’s lack of impulse control, once again demonstrated his inability to plan more than one move ahead at a time after the investigative news outfit ProPublica emailed a list of questions for its story pegged to his flight to a comped 2008 luxury fishing trip in Alaska on a hedge fund billionaire’s private jet.
Dick Cheney for a duck hunting trip at a private camp in Louisiana. A few weeks before, the Supreme Court had voted to hear the vice president's appeal of a ruling that required the disclosure of energy industry lobbyists who had met with his energy policy task force.
When news of the trip was revealed, Scalia said his stay at the hunting camp involved personal hospitality unrelated to his court work.
And he said he need not step aside from ruling in Cheney's case.
That is a great relief to the American people, I am sure. Alito’s response to ProPublica—he was pre-responding to a report from the investigative publication—actually served as a preview of their reporting. His statement came in the form of an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial section is typically conservative. And while he made a few good points in his own defense, the court’s second-most senior associate justice appears to have missed the judicial ethics forest for the trees—or, perhaps more accurately, the stream for the salmon.
The late Justice Antonin Scalia left a long legacy on the Supreme Court, from his devotion to originalism to his sharp-tongued rhetoric.
But the enthusiastic hunter and fisherman also set a precedent of sorts on how to take free trips without disclosing them — one that is now causing headaches for some justices.
In 2004, Scalia flew with then-Vice President Dick Cheney for a duck hunting trip at a private camp in Louisiana. A few weeks before, the Supreme Court had votd to hear the vice president's appeal of a ruling that required the disclosure of energy industry lobbyists who had met with his energy policy task force.
When news of the trip was revealed, Scalia said his stay at the hunting camp involved personal hospitality unrelated to his court work.
And he said he need not step aside from ruling in Cheney's case.
"I do not think my impartiality could reasonably be questioned," he said at the time. He later joined a 7-2 ruling that shielded Cheney from disclosing the participants in his energy task force.
On Tuesday, ProPublica revealed that Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. in 2008 took a free and undisclosed private flight to Alaska with hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer and stayed at a "luxury fishing lodge that charged more than $1,000 a day."
Photos from the trip show Alito and Singer each proudly posing with a thick king salmon.
"Three years before," the story noted, "the same businessman flew Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, on a private jet to Alaska and paid the bill for his stay."
When the ProPublica reporters sent questions to Alito, he responded by sending the Wall Street Journal an opinion piece that appeared late Tuesday rebutting the allegations that he had taken a free trip paid for by a billionaire with cases before the court.
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