The most remarkable thing about the Supreme Court’s opinions announced Monday was not what the justices wrote or said. It was what Samuel Alito did.
The associate justice, a George W. Bush appointee, read two
opinions, both 5-4 decisions that split the court along its usual
right-left divide. But Alito didn’t stop there. When Justice Ruth Bader
Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench, Alito visibly mocked his
colleague.Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the high court, was making her
argument about how the majority opinion made it easier for sexual
harassment to occur in the workplace when Alito, seated immediately to
Ginsburg’s left, shook his head from side to side in disagreement,
rolled his eyes and looked at the ceiling.His treatment of the
80-year-old Ginsburg, 17 years his elder and with 13 years more
seniority, was a curious display of judicial temperament or, more
accurately, judicial intemperance. Typically, justices state their
differences in words — and Alito, as it happens, had just spoken several
hundred of his own from the bench. But he frequently supplements words
with middle-school gestures.
Talk about an arrogant display of dickishness worthy of the man who appointed him, President Beavis. What’s next, Sammy? Towel snapping? Whoopie cushion placement?
I know, bring a beer bong and get plastered on the bench for the next opinion you disagree with. Beyond boorishness, this is an example of poor sportsmanship as well as ageism, sexism, and several other isms that will occur to me later. YOUR SIDE WON.
Show a little humility instead of acting like a better educated version of your fellow New Jerseyan, Juicy Joe Giudice.