Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said in a recently published interview that he frequently wishes his late colleague, Justice Antonin Scalia, were still around.
“Even since Nino died, things are so different. I so often wish he were still here. He started so much, and it would have been good to have him around to see it to completion,” Alito said, according to a Politico Magazine piece by Newsmax chief Washington correspondent James Rosen, who has authored books about Scalia.
Scalia, who was appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan, began serving on the Supreme Court in 1986 and remained on the bench until his death in 2016.
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Rosen wrote that he conveyed that one of Scalia’s children had told him that she was grateful to God for taking her father at that time because it meant that he did not have to witness much that would have been upsetting to him.
“He would have been appalled at so much,” Alito concurred, according to the report.
Alito delivered the opinion in the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that struck down the controversial 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision.
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“The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives,” Alito declared in the 2022 opinion.
Rosen asked Alito whether that 2022 decision is “indebted to Antonin Scalia in any meaningful respect.”
“Yes, absolutely, because that was my effort to write an originalist’s opinion… I think I learned from the model of [District of Columbia v.] Heller,” Alito said, referring to a case pertaining to a 2008 gun rights case in which Scalia delivered the court’s opinion.
“I don’t know that Nino would have written [Dobbs] any differently. I flatter myself to think that he wouldn’t have written it very differently. And the language, to a degree, may be influenced by him,” Alito said, according to the report.
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Alito was appointed by GOP President George W. Bush in 2005 and began serving on the Supreme Court in 2006.
