Justice Samuel Alito just took The Atlantic to task over an article he said painted a “false and inflammatory” picture of a recent Supreme Court decision on an abortion bill out of Texas.
According to Breitbart, Alito exposed the Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer for overselling the impact of the high court’s decision, which allowed the law, astutely dubbed the Texas Heartbeat Act, to stand for the time being.
“Ludicrously dishonest”
In his piece, published Sept. 2, Serwer accused the “conservative majority on the Supreme Court” of being “so eager to nullify Roe v. Wade, the 1973 precedent securing the right to abortion, that it didn’t even wait for oral arguments.”
The journalist wrote: “Instead, in the middle of the night, five of the high court’s conservatives issued a brief, unsigned order allowing a Texas law that bans abortion at six weeks.”
The law “gives private citizens the authority to sue anyone who ‘knowingly … aids or abets’ an abortion and rewards them with $10,000 if successful,” Serwer notes.
Serwer also said “the justices in the majority argued in their unsigned opinion that because the case presented ‘complex and novel antecedent procedural questions,’ their hands were tied,” calling his assertion “ludicrously dishonest.”
But it’s Serwer who Alito says was stretching the truth.
“We did no such thing”
Speaking at the University of Notre Dame on Thursday, the justice said the journalist’s assertions were flat-out false.
“Put aside the false and inflammatory claim that we nullified Roe v. Wade — we did no such thing and we said that expressly in our order,” Alito said in his speech, according to Breitbart.
Citing the order itself, the justice said: “I quote: ‘The applicants now before us have raised serious questions regarding the constitutionality of the Texas law at issue. This order is not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’s law.”
“So the statement is flatly wrong,” Alito declared, “and the suggestion that we should’ve held oral argument is ridiculous.”
Serwer responded to the criticism with a head-scratcher, writing in a Thursday tweet on the matter: “[I]t’s not often the justices make your point for you. So thanks.”
The post Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito lashes out over ‘false and inflammatory’ report first appeared on Conservative Institute.
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