Samuel Alito The Smol Bean
Even talking about SCOTUS expansion is a bullying tactic, Smol Bean Sammy says
Conservatives, right wingers, people of that nature, they all have an incredible knack for transforming themselves into helpless victims at the mercy of powerful forces, seen and unseen, when it suits their political aims.
Maybe the longtime Bad Faith Times readers will remember Speaker of the House Mike Johnson shrinking into a smol bean when the Trump regime was salivating at the prospect of taking food out of the mouths of hungry American families by gouging the SNAP benefit program. Back in October 2025, Johnson, who controls the U.S. House of Representatives, said there was nothing Republicans could do about the regime's lust for starving their constituents as a kind of hobby outside their full-time job of shoveling government money into the pockets of the twenty richest guys to ever live. Mike was a smol bean after all.
The Republican Party is either an unstoppable extra-constitutional force unburdened by the law or the smollest bean you've ever seen, depending on what, exactly they're trying to achieve.
So it makes sense that Samuel Alito, who has spent the better part of twenty years using fancy legalese to say Republicans are the only legitimate rulers of the United States, is now cowering under the table as elected Democrats and their allies (finally) talk about reforming the Supreme Court.
The libs are threatening me, Alito said in a recent interview with Fox News. I'm scared, he said. Make them stop. I am but a smol bean.
Talking about his new book, which is mostly about how the country's founders – who did not consider women or Black folks to be fully human – would have ruled on issues like abortion rights and voting rights, Alito told the Mar-a-lago-faced Fox News Lady that even discussing the reform and expansion of the Supreme Court was a bid to bully members of the Court's right-wing majority, all of whom are extremely smol beans.
“I am concerned that there has been a concerted effort to intimidate the court, and justices on the court, to try to influence us to decide cases differently from the way in which we have been deciding them,” Alito said. “I am concerned about the future of the court. I think it’s an important institution. It has not always done the right thing, but I think on the whole it has been fundamental in protecting our constitutional structure and the rights that all Americans enjoy.”
Denny Carter
Alito told Fox News Lady that the justices don't talk about calls to reform and expand the Supreme Court. It's a funny thing to say since we all know Alito and Clarence Thomas are the pettiest people in public life and take everything as a personal insult, that the chips on their shoulders would break the backs of more well-adjusted men who do not have world-historic victim complexes.
The same fella who granted our racist-game-show-host-turned-president absolute immunity from constitutional law and would have happily overturned the free and fair 2020 presidential election says people shouldn't be so darn mean to him and his colleagues. Threatening to have a good time and adding four or six or twenty justices to the Supreme Court is the tactic of a bully who's not getting his way, Alito whines in the interview. The bully in this case being regular folks who enjoy a little rule of law and constitutional scholars who are wailing about the Roberts Court as an anti-constitutional captured institution at war with the rest of the U.S. judiciary.
Alito in his chat with Fox News Lady fully exposes constitutional originalism for the farce that it is, explaining that he and the other right-wing justices have no choice but to follow the original meaning of constitutional law. It just so happens, says Smol Bean Sammy, that originalism approves of every Republican law or executive order and strikes down every Democratic attempt at making federal policy. Alito says: I can't help that the judicial philosophy I have adopted as a lifelong right-wing hatchet man is perfectly aligned with the goals of the Republican Party and the plutocratic ruling class. Stop being so mad at me, he says, a tear streaming down his cheek.
Denny Carter
Fox News Lady asked Alito – a veritable master of bad-faith legalism – about the Roberts Court's use of the Shadow Docket to shape federal policy. Alito, repeating a line recently used by Neil Gorsuch – another smol bean – said recent presidents from both parties have had trouble getting their policies through Congress, which really doesn't make laws anymore. That, he says, leaves the Supreme Court no choice but to make policy from the bench. I did not attend law school and have only read a couple books on constitutional originalism but I don't think this vision of the Supreme Court as a maker of policy fits within the philosophy. Oh well!
Because I'm obsessed with Alito's bad-faith legalism, I watched the whole damn interview. Here are some bad faith highlights if you're into such things.
