National Review senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke, on today’s edition of The Editors, said the Left’s recent attacks on Justice Alito are “silly” and “contributing to a total lack of intellectual ammunition within the judicial realm that is haunting progressivism.” Alito has faced criticism for shedding Budweiser stock and for his wife’s having allegedly hung an upside-down American flag after the 2020 election in apparent protest over the results.
Cooke said the controversy isn’t really about those specific incidents. “Alito is guilty of having written the majority opinion in Dobbs,” he said. “That’s what this is about. Clarence Thomas is guilty too, of having written the majority opinion in Bruen.
“I don’t see this as a both-sides question,” Cooke said. “The conservative movement hews to originalism, which . . . is a principled and consistent way of looking at the law that is in line with the very idea of a written constitution. Progressivism does not. Progressivism regards the Supreme Court as a check on the people.”
Cooke pointed out that “conservatives have not just won control of the Court because they happen to have won the right elections in the Senate and the presidency, although that is part of the story. The conservatives have won because they have decimated and more the prevailing progressive judicial orthodoxy, which was living constitutionalism.
“Originalism,” he stressed, “has prevailed because originalism is correct, because it’s unanswerable, because it’s been advanced by the smartest and most consistent and most impressive people in the country for 50 years. There is, at least at the margins, an opportunity for smart progressives to counter it with something. Perhaps it won’t work. Hopefully it won’t work, but . . . they haven’t even started that project.”
Cooke said that, instead, they’ve tried to “question whether the Court should exist” and “embark on this absurd cascade of allegations that just seem farcical to anyone who investigates them. . . . I don’t think that we have to pretend this means anything.”
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