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.
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.
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.
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 judge to rule. Alito, however, was the exception. During the 10-year window that Unikowsky examined, the Court heard six standing cases brought by conservative plaintiffs, and Alito voted for all of them. During the same window, the Court heard 10 standing cases brought by progressive plaintiffs, and Alito voted against every single one.
Some of Alito’s standing opinions, moreover, wildly contort themselves to get to the preferred conservative result. In California v. Texas (2021), for example, Alito claimed that a plaintiff challenging a zero-dollar tax had standing to challenge the entire Affordable Care Act, even though a zero-dollar charge injures no one at all.
But, while Alito’s partisanship sometimes led him to defend indefensible positions, his record on the Supreme Court nonetheless reveals a skilled advocate, adept not only in making substantive arguments that favored his Republican Party, but also in honing arcane procedural rules into weapons against Democratic policies and legislation. It was as if one of the most partisan and highly skilled GOP lawyers also held one of the Court’s nine votes.
Alito was on the vanguard of the GOP’s opposition to DEI
Long before Trump made dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion programs a central part of his second administration, Alito was one of the most frequent critics of anti-racism legislation in government — sometimes lashing out at the very suggestion that racism might exist in the United States, or that it has existed in America’s past.
In Department of Commerce v. New York (2019), for example, a majority of Alito’s colleagues voted to strike down a change to the 2020 census forms due to concerns that the first Trump administration did not tell the truth about why it wanted to make this change. Alito began his dissent with an angry rant denouncing the fact that some critics of this change had “attacked” it as “racist,” even though this allegation did not appear in the Court’s majority opinion.
Similarly, in Ramos v. Louisiana (2020), the Court struck down Oregon and Louisiana’s unusual practice of permitting non-unanimous juries to convict a criminal defendant of a “serious offense.” Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Republican, wrote the majority opinion, which noted that both states originally embraced non-unanimous convictions for racist reasons.
Louisiana, Gorsuch wrote, permitted them in its 1898 constitution because it “sought to undermine African-American participation on juries” — the idea was that only a small number of Black people were likely to serve on any given jury, so the white majority would be able to outvote any Black jurors who supported acquittal. Oregon’s practice, which was adopted in the 1930s, “can be similarly traced to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and efforts to dilute ‘the influence of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities on Oregon juries.’”
In dissent, Alito lashed out at Gorsuch for “tar[ing] Louisiana and Oregon with the charge of racism for permitting nonunanimous verdicts,” even though the racism Gorsuch described in his opinion was about a century old. The idea that Louisiana lawmakers were not motivated by racism in 1898, the height of the Jim Crow era, is too ridiculous to entertain. And the Ku Klux Klan’s infiltration of Oregon in the early 20th century, and the KKK’s success in enacting racist legislation in that state, is well-documented by historians.
“Too much public discourse today,” Alito wrote, “is sullied by ad hominem rhetoric, that is, attempts to discredit an argument not by proving that it is unsound but by attacking the character or motives of the argument’s proponents.” Apparently, Alito would bar allegations of racism even when that allegation is directed toward white supremacist lawmakers in the Jim Crow South.
Alito’s disdain for allegations of racism, moreover, wasn’t simply rhetorical. He often read federal civil rights laws — and, especially, voting rights laws — in illogical or atextual ways in order to reduce or eliminate legal safeguards against discrimination.
In Abbott v. Perez (2018), for example, Alito wrote the majority opinion for himself and his Republican colleagues, which reinstated a Texas congressional map that a lower court had struck down as an illegal racial gerrymander. The facts of Perez are complicated, but they involved a years-long challenge to Texas’s maps. At some point during that litigation, the state legislature enacted new maps which corrected some, but not all, of the alleged defects in the old maps.
Alito’s opinion concluded that this half-fix was sufficient because “the only direct evidence brought to our attention suggests that the 2013 Legislature’s intent was legitimate.” Specifically, the state legislature “wanted to bring the litigation about the State’s districting plans to an end as expeditiously as possible.”
Alito, in other words, determined that the state legislature can cure its previous racial gerrymander by enacting a new law that is motivated by a desire to shut down the lawsuit challenging that gerrymander, even if that law doesn’t actually fix the gerrymander. It’s as if the school board at issue in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) had passed a law admitting a single Black student to a white public school, and then the Supreme Court declared that this partial fix was enough to end any legal challenges to school segregation.
Similarly, in Brnovich v. DNC (2021), the Supreme Court considered whether the Voting Rights Act permits certain election state laws that have “small disparate impacts on members of minority groups.” Alito’s opinion for himself and his Republican colleagues did not simply rule that the Act permits the state laws at issue in Brnovich, it invented a list of new limits on the Voting Rights Act which appear nowhere in the statute itself.
Among other things, Alito’s Brnovich opinion creates a strong presumption that election laws that are justified by a desire to prevent voter fraud do not violate the Voting Rights Act, regardless of burdens these laws may place on minorities, even though the Act says nothing whatsoever about fraud. Brnovich also invents a presumption that voting restrictions that were “standard practice when [the Voting Rights Act] was amended in 1982” are lawful.
This later presumption is completely nonsensical because, whatever Congress intended when it amended the law in 1982, it clearly did not intend to maintain the status quo that existed in that year. Typically, when lawmakers amend or enact a new law, it is because they are unsatisfied with “standard practice” at the time and want to change the way things are done.
As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her Brnovich dissent, Alito’s opinion “mostly inhabits a law-free zone.”
The culmination of Alito’s approach to voting rights was Louisiana v. Callais (2026), where Alito wrote an opinion joined by all of his Republican colleagues, that repealed the 1982 law Alito rewrote in Brnovich. Callais was a redistricting case — Alito and his fellow Republicans targeted an amended provision of the Voting Rights Act that had long been understood to require many states to draw a minimum number of legislative districts where Black or Latino voters could elect their preferred candidates.
Almost immediately after Callais was handed down, white Republicans in states like Louisiana, Tennessee, and Mississippi began redrawing their maps to replace Black Democrats in Congress with white Republicans.
Alito’s opinions in Perez, Brnovich, and Callais show that he approached race cases in much the same way he approached standing (or other cases). Alito would frequently begin with the result that he wanted, and then come up with an argument to support that result — regardless of whether his argument had any basis in text, precedent, or any other accepted legal principles.
It’s notable, moreover, that all of his fellow Republican justices decided to join Alito’s opinions in Perez, Brnovich, and Callais. Whatever else can be said about Alito’s cavalier approach to legal reasoning, there is clearly an appetite for his results-oriented approach on the Supreme Court. And there is no shortage of similarly partisan lower court judges who can carry on Alito’s legacy of advancing conservative interests.
One of Alito’s most lasting legacies is likely to be the Court’s new approach to religion
Though Alito was a staunch partisan, his decisions were not entirely reactive to whatever agenda his party pushed in his Court. He frequently took a very proactive role in pushing conservative policies that he felt strongly about, and often persuaded enough of his colleagues to join him in making those policies law.
Alito, for example, didn’t just write the Court’s opinion overruling Roe v. Wade and eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion, he appears to have “precirculated the draft opinion” to the four justices who ultimately joined that opinion, according to reporting by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak, “getting buy-in before sharing it with the full group of justices.” Alito also overcame resistance from, of all people, Justice Antonin Scalia, to his plan to weaken public sector unions by stripping them of their ability to collect fees from non-members who benefit from the union’s bargaining.
But Alito’s most enduring legacy is likely to be his approach to religion, a project he began as a lower court judge.
For many years, the Supreme Court tried to strike a careful balance between the rights of people of faith with religious objections to the law, and the rights of individuals who benefit from those laws — sometimes exempting religious objectors from certain laws, but not when doing so would diminish the rights of others. In United States v. Lee (1982), for example, the Court rejected a claim that people with religious objections to paying Social Security taxes may refuse to do so. Lee announced a broad rule that religious business owners cannot gain a competitive advantage by exempting themselves from laws that apply to their competitors.
“When followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice,” the Court held in Lee, “the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity.”
Alito began to tear down this rule with his 5-4 opinion in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), which held that religious employers who object to birth control may defy a federal regulation requiring employer-provided health plans to cover contraception. Hobby Lobby relied on a federal religious liberty statute and not on the First Amendment, but it was still a very significant decision because it established that religious objectors may sometimes use those objections to undermine the rights of others. And the Court largely constitutionalized the legal regime Alito announced in Hobby Lobby six years later, in Roman Catholic Diocese v. Cuomo (2020).
Similarly, in his final years on the Court, Alito championed a new regime that allows religious conservatives to dominate other minority groups that they find objectionable. Writing for the Court’s Republican majority in Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025), Alito wrote that parents who object to books with LGBTQ characters or themes must be informed in advance if those books will be used in their child’s classroom, and must be permitted to opt their child out of any lessons involving those books. The opinion is written broadly, and seems to require schools to inform any parent who may object to any lesson on any religious grounds.
Public schools will likely find it impossible to comply with Mahmoud; as Justice Robert Jackson wrote in a 1948 opinion, there were “256 separate and substantial religious bodies” within the United States at the time — a number that has almost certainly grown in the past eight decades. If courts attempted to “eliminate everything that is objectionable to any of these warring sects or inconsistent with any of their doctrines” Jackson warned, they “will leave public education in shreds.”
Before Mahmoud, parents filed lawsuits raising religious objections to lessons touching on divorce, interfaith couples, “immodest dress,” evolution, pacifism, magic, women achieving things outside of the home, and “false views of death.” Thanks to Mahmoud, schools will have to know in advance which parents object to books with magic in them, and warn those parents if their children may be exposed to Harry Potter. They may very well have to warn parents if a teacher plans to teach a biography of former President Ronald Reagan, because Reagan was divorced.
And Mahmoud is likely to banish books with queer characters from public school instruction altogether. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent, many school districts “cannot afford to engage in costly litigation over opt-out rights or to divert resources to tracking and managing student absences.” Their only practical option will be to “censor their curricula” to remove material that might trigger a religious objection.
For this reason, Mahmoud may be the quintessential Alito opinion. Alito saw the world in terms of winners and losers, and he was determined to make sure that his side won. He was a zealous advocate for the political factions, identity groups, and causes that he embraced, and he cared little whether advancing their causes would harm others or damage important institutions such as public schools.
Samuel Alito was one of the most important conservative Republican legal advocates of the last several decades. He consistently, forcefully, and often quite successfully championed the political causes supported by the Republican Party. He often bided his time, spending years or even decades pushing these causes until he had a Supreme Court majority willing to rule in his favor. And he remained a loyal partisan even when he had to embrace embarrassing legal arguments in order to do so.
And he did all this, while also holding one of nine votes on the most powerful institution in the United States.
