Shawn Fleetwood of the Federalist documents key elements of a recent interview with a conservative U.S. Supreme Court justice.
On June 6, the George W. Bush appointee participated in a sit-down interview with the Hoover Institution’s Peter Robinson. Released on Wednesday, the roughly hour-long exchange covered a variety of issues relevant America’s ongoing political discourse. …
… After alluding to the activist nature of the Supreme Court under former Chief Justice Earl Warren, Alito provided a brief overview of the originalist movement that sprung up in the years following. He specifically highlighted the views of intellectual thought leaders such as former Justice Antonin Scalia, former Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, and Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese — all of whom he credited as being the movement’s “three pioneers.”
“What they argued is basically that the Constitution is a text and it should be read basically the way other texts are read. We read the words, they’re understandable. The English language hasn’t changed that much since the late 18th century. We can figure out what it means, where it refers to legal concepts, established legal principles. We can explore what they were understood to mean at the time, and that’s the way it should be interpreted,” Alito said. “So, it was an effort to provide a structured, disciplined, and restrained way of reading the Constitution.”
During a conversation on past SCOTUS decisions related to race, Robinson referenced the high court’s prior rulings upholding the use of affirmative action in college admissions and how the majority in those cases effectively contended that the Constitution was not colorblind. After discussing these prior decisions, Alito noted how the Court later “corrected” itself in 2023 by deeming affirmative action policies unconstitutional, and that America’s founding document does, in fact, not treat individuals differently based on race.
“I think that our Constitution is colorblind … How are we gonna hold together if we don’t regard each other simply as fellow human beings, as fellow Americans, and judge people based on their individual characteristics?” Alito said.
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Author: Mitch Kokai
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