These revelations were as unsurprising as they were dispiriting, given the tranche of recent exposes about the overlapping social circles of conservative Supreme Court Justices and Bond villain-rich conservative donors. The Alito news joined a spate of stories about BFFs Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow, in which the Walmart-loving Justice was identified as the recipient of decades of financial and other support from the Dallas real estate magnate, and earlier reports about the frequent canoodling of the late Justice Antonin Scalia with various denizens of the Republican pecuniary pantheon.
These stories are now frequent enough to have accreted their own rituals of response and defense. First comes the pearl-clutching indignation of the Justice himself, protesting that no "reasonable person" could possibly think he had an "obligation" to report or recuse, and then the covering fire from the Right's network of publicists and apologists. The Wall Street Journal huffed that the Alito reveal was "a non-scandal built on partisan spin" which constituted a "political assault on the Supreme Court" and "judicial independence." The only novelty in this latest "non-scandal" would seem to be the Journal's decision to publish Alito's rebuttal before the ProPublica story itself appeared. (When Alito told ProPublica that he would have "no comment" on their story, he apparently meant "No comment that won't appear in a major national newspaper friendly to me and mine.")
