Justice Alito does one last favor for the Republican Party

Of course Alito is retiring under Trump.

Justice Samuel Alito announced on Tuesday that he will retire, thus all but guaranteeing that his seat on the Supreme Court will be held by a Republican for years to come.

This development will not surprise anyone who has followed Alito’s career. During nearly two full decades as a justice, Alito showed unwavering loyalty to the Republican Party and to the causes championed by its right flank.

Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser.

Alito opposed LGBTQ rights, abortion, Obamacare, and the proposition that voting rights laws should be read in a manner consistent with their text. He backed a dubious lawsuit trying to prevent Democratic officials from asking social media outlets to voluntarily change what they publish, while unsuccessfully trying to give Republicans the power to seize control over those same outlets. He would often lash out in anger at the very suggestion that white lawmakers — including white lawmakers in the Jim Crow South — might have been motivated by racism. Yet he would tar Black leaders with similar allegations of racism.

Alito, a former federal prosecutor, was the Court’s most pro-prosecution justice — except when the criminal defendant was a January 6 insurrectionist or when it was Donald Trump. One of his major projects as a justice was undermining labor unions, interest groups that have historically favored the Democratic Party.

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Nor did Alito make much of an effort to hide his partisanship. In the immediate wake of Trump’s failed attempt to overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential election, flags associated with the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” movement flew outside Alito’s homes (he later blamed these flags on his wife). In 2012, shortly after President Barack Obama’s reelection, Alito warned the conservative Federalist Society that America was caught in a “moment of utmost sterility, darkest night, most extreme peril.”

So it is fitting that Alito ends his career with one final gift to the Republican Party. By choosing to retire under Trump, Alito helps ensure that his successor will be a younger version of himself — just as partisan, but with many more years of service to give to the GOP.

Alito was a masterful advocate for the Republican Party

Though Alito was a partisan, he was not a substanceless hack. He was a skilled judicial craftsman, whose opinions typically reflected the best possible argument for the conservative Republican position (though Alito was not above arguing for that position even when there were no good arguments that could support it).

He could be a devastating questioner — once transforming the argument in Citizens United v. FEC (2010), the Court’s decision permitting corporations to spend unlimited money to influence elections, into an argument about whether the government could ban books. And he had a particular talent for using obscure procedural arguments to try to get rid of cases he knew his side was going to lose.

Dissenting in A.A.R.P. v. Trump (2025), for example, Alito argued that the Trump administration should effectively be allowed to deport people to a Salvadorian gulag without due process, because of a dubious claim that his Court lacked jurisdiction over the case. He then spent the bulk of the opinion arguing that each individual person Trump wants to disappear to El Salvador must bring an individual lawsuit, rather than permitting courts to issue a broad order protecting many potential deportees.

Similarly, in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (2016), a challenge to an anti-abortion law that was brought while the Court still had a majority that supports abortion rights, Alito fixated on a baroque claim that the case must be thrown out because some of the plaintiffs previously brought a similar lawsuit. Four years later, when a majority of his colleagues voted to strike down an identical law to the one in Hellerstedt, Alito attacked a longstanding rule that permits abortion providers to sue to challenge anti-abortion laws.

In fairness, it’s probably possible to examine any long-serving judge’s record and pick out cases where their procedural rulings aligned with their political views. But data shows that Alito’s tendency to use procedure to achieve substantive results went beyond individual anecdotes to form a pattern.

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In 2023, attorney Adam Unikowsky examined 10 years’ worth of the Supreme Court’s “standing” decisions (going back to 2013), where the plaintiff could fairly be described as “conservative or progressive.” (Before anyone can bring a federal lawsuit, they must show that they have “standing” to sue — meaning that they claim they were injured in some way by the defendant they are suing.)

Most justices reached results that departed from their political views at least some of the time — which is how you would expect any fair........

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