“Less concerned with abstract theory and more concerned with allowing judicial rulings to function in the real world.” That is how the Wall Street Journal described Justice Alito’s approach to deciding cases in an article published last weekend. The Journal added that Alito has a “complicated relationship with originalism.” If that assessment is true, then no justice has a straightforward relationship with the approach.
Spanning Trump’s second term, the article tallied how often each Supreme Court justice sided with President Trump’s positions. It found that Alito led the Court with an 89% agreement rate. The piece then asked why Justice Alito agreed with the President so often, even though Justices Thomas and Gorsuch had similar rates of 88% and 84%, respectively. By contrast, Justice Jackson’s intense opposition to Trump, ruling against him 98% of the time, was not mentioned once. The fixation on Alito as an outlier does not make sense based on the data, but also on the deeper discus…
