Happy Friday. We figured this news would drop on a weekender.Justice Samuel Alito has a message for the Democratic activists, the liberal legal commentariat, and every progressive who has spent the last year fantasizing about his retirement: not happening.In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Alito confirmed he will serve another term on the Supreme Court. He’s staying. The 6-3 conservative majority is staying. Every nightmare scenario the left has been constructing around Alito’s potential departure can be filed away — at least for now.
The announcement itself matters less than what preceded it — because NPR already made this story embarrassing for everyone involved before Alito even had to say a word.
On the final day of Supreme Court opinions in June, National Public Radio — your tax dollars at work — published a piece reporting that Alito was retiring. The story caused a minor national shockwave. Liberal America dared to hope. Conservative America braced. And then everyone discovered that the story was wrong. Completely, embarrassingly, unprofessionally wrong.
The retraction and explanation were, if anything, worse than the original error. NPR’s Nina Totenberg — the veteran Supreme Court reporter who has covered the institution for decades — claimed she had misheard an announcement. Then that explanation turned out not to be accurate either. A blog post explaining the error was subsequently updated after Totenberg went on All Things Considered to explain what happened, producing a correction to the correction.
To summarize: NPR published a false story about Samuel Alito retiring. Then published a false blog post about how the false story was published. Then corrected the false explanation after the false explanation became the story.
Alito has been one of the conservative majority’s most unapologetic voices — and by “unapologetic” I mean both willing to write sharp, sometimes savage dissents and equally willing to call out the institutional pressure campaigns targeting the Court as the political operations they are. The left despises him for both. The coordinated harassment campaigns targeting his home, the endless ethics complaints, the media pile-ons that followed every decision that went the wrong way for progressives — none of it moved him. None of it will.
He’s here for another term. The 6-3 majority is intact. The DSA co-chair who wants to abolish the Supreme Court is going to have to find another angle.
NPR already burned the retirement story down in advance. Now they can watch Alito keep working.