Worse than we knew
We learned earlier from a “whistleblower” that a religious right group had spent years infiltrating the wingnut Supreme Court members to influence them to vote on their issues. It certainly seems to have paid off. Now there’s evidence that at least one Supreme Court member reciprocated and gave them a heads up about an important decision. That Justice was Samuel Alito. Of course it was.
In a letter to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and in interviews with The New York Times, the Rev. Rob Schenck said he was told the outcome of the 2014 case weeks before it was announced. He used that information to prepare a public relations push, records show, and he said that at the last minute he tipped off the president of Hobby Lobby, the craft store chain owned by Christian evangelicals that was the winning party in the case.
Both court decisions were triumphs for conservatives and the religious right. Both majority opinions were written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. But the leak of the draft opinion overturning the constitutional right to abortion was disclosed in the news media by Politico, setting off a national uproar. With Hobby Lobby, according to Mr. Schenck, the outcome was shared with only a handful of advocates.
Mr. Schenck’s allegation creates an unusual, contentious situation: a minister who spent years at the center of the anti-abortion movement, now turned whistle-blower; a denial by a sitting justice; and an institution that shows little outward sign of getting to the bottom of the recent leak of the abortion ruling or of following up on Mr. Schenck’s allegation.
The evidence for Mr. Schenck’s account of the breach has gaps. But in months of examining Mr. Schenck’s claims, The Times found a trail of contemporaneous emails and conversations that strongly suggested he knew the outcome and the author of the Hobby Lobby decision before it was made public.
In May, after the draft opinion in the abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, was leaked in what Justice Alito recently called “a grave betrayal,” the chief justice took the unusual step of ordering an investigation by the Supreme Court’s marshal. Two months later, Mr. Schenck sent his letter to Chief Justice Roberts, saying he believed his information about the Hobby Lobby case was relevant to the inquiry. He said he has not gotten any response.
In early June 2014, an Ohio couple who were Mr. Schenck’s star donors shared a meal with Justice Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann. A day later, Gayle Wright, one of the pair, contacted Mr. Schenck, according to an email reviewed by The Times. “Rob, if you want some interesting news please call. No emails,” she wrote.
Mr. Schenck said Mrs. Wright told him that the decision would be favorable to Hobby Lobby, and that Justice Alito had written the majority opinion. Three weeks later, that’s exactly what happened. The court ruled, in a 5-4 vote, that requiring family-owned corporations to pay for insurance covering contraception violated their religious freedoms. The decision would have major implications for birth control access, President Barack Obama’s new health care law and corporations’ ability to claim religious rights.
Justice Alito, in a statement issued through the court’s spokeswoman, denied disclosing the decision. He said that he and his wife shared a “casual and purely social relationship” with the Wrights, and did not dispute that the two couples ate together on June 3, 2014. But the justice said that the “allegation that the Wrights were told the outcome of the decision in the Hobby Lobby case, or the authorship of the opinion of the Court, by me or my wife, is completely false.”
Mrs. Wright, in a phone interview, denied obtaining or passing along any such information. A representative for Hobby Lobby would not comment. Beyond sharing Justice Alito’s statement, a spokeswoman for the court declined to answer questions about Mr. Schenck’s account or its investigation.
Mr. Schenck was not present at the meal and has no written record of his conversation with Mrs. Wright. But The Times interviewed four people who said he told them years ago about the breach, and emails from June 2014 show him suggesting he had confidential information and directing his staff to prepare for victory. In another email, sent in 2017, he described the disclosure as “one of the most difficult secrets I’ve ever kept in my life.”
Alito is not a Justice. He is a right wing operative, as are the rest of the 6 member majority. And as operatives with lifetime tenure they have no qualms about pushing their agenda even in light of ample evidence that they are what they are. Just look at how Clarence Thomas has handled the scandal of his wife trying to overturn the election. (Does anyone think she wasn’t sharing the thinking of her husband with the loons she was in contact with? )
This may end up being the worst scandal the high court has ever had. The problem is that, like the rest of the right wing legal establishment — and the right wing in general) shamelessness is their super-power. They. Don’t. Care.
Whatever else happens in our political system. If we manage to beat back the Republicans at the ballot box and show them democratically that the country rejects them these people will still wield incredible power and there’s not a whole lot anyone is going to do about it.