Alito's popularity by Linda Greenhouse
It's all right with Sam.
Samuel A. Alito Jr. may be the least recognizable of Supreme Court justices. I doubt if one American in a thousand could pick him out of a lineup. Those who do know the name, if not the face, of the 64-year-old justice most likely lump him with the other conservatives who as a bloc dominate the Roberts court.
But to the political right, and to a degree that has escaped general attention, Sam Alito is much more than just a face in the conservative crowd. He’s something special. He is a rock star — and not only for his headline appearances at gatherings of the conservative Federalist Society. He is the redemption of the promise that failed a quarter-century ago, when John H. Sununu, chief of staff to President George H.W. Bush, assured worried conservatives that the president had selected a hole-in-one Supreme Court nominee: David H. Souter.
Conservatives are confident that unlike Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who committed the unpardonable sin of saving the Affordable Care Act, Sam Alito will never go soft in the crunch. Unlike Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, he is utterly reliable. (Will Justice Alito vote for a right to same-sex marriage, as Justice Kennedy is widely expected to do? Not on your life.) Unlike Justice Antonin Scalia, whose rhetorical excesses yield diminishing returns these days (his perfervid dissent in the 2013 Defense of Marriage Act case has been widely cited by lower court judges as demonstrating that the constitutional basis for a right to same-sex marriage is now beyond debate), Sam Alito is never bombastic. And he avoids the self-indulgent eccentricity that has rendered Justice Clarence Thomas a nonplayer.
In the November issue of the religious journal First Things, Prof. Michael Stokes Paulsen, describing Justice Alito as the “man of the hour,” accurately labeled him “the most consistent, solid, successful conservative on the court,” adding: “There are louder talkers, flashier stylists, wittier wits, more-poisonous pens, but no one with a more level and solid swing than Justice Samuel Alito.”
I’m sure that Professor Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis didn’t mean to imply that Justice Alito shines only by comparison with imperfect colleagues. In conservative eyes, Justice Alito’s merit is not relative but absolute. He delivers: not only in the big cases, like Hobby Lobby last June, in which he wrote the majority opinion upholding the right of a corporation’s religious owners to an exemption from the federal mandate to include contraception coverage in their employee health plan, but also in less visible moves that don’t get much public attention but that speak powerfully to the base.
It sounds discordant to suggest that a Supreme Court justice has a base, but Sam Alito has one. One of several recent hagiographic articles in the right-wing press was one in the American Spectator back in May, describing Samuel Alito as “one of the noblest men in American public life today.”
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