Samuel Alito Had No Problem Removing Other Judges From Cases:
Man, it must be so fuckin' great to be Sammy Alito. Motherfucker can say anything and conservatives'll have his back en masse. Alito can say to Diane Feinstein about his statement on a job app that he hates him some Roe v. Wade, according to Feinstein, "I was an advocate seeking a job, it was a political job and that was 1985." And the right wing acts like he lied that he had french fryer experience on a Wendy's application - c'mon, it was twenty years ago, who cares, he was a kid, Ed Meese's jowls hypnotized him, what do ya want from the boy?

Sammy Alito can write in his questionnaire for his circuit court nomination in 1990, stating plainly, clearly, that he'd "disqualify himself from any cases involving the Vanguard companies," which seemed reasonable since Alito had, like, hundreds of thousands of dollars invested with Vanguard funds. Then he can rule in favor of Vanguard in 2002, a case he got "due to a computer error" that should have warned him that Vanguard was involved. Sammy went ahead to rule on the case, even though Vanguard was the defendant, which means he either lied to the Senate or he didn't read the list of involved parties at the top of the brief, which says, "The Vanguard Group Inc., Vanguard Fiduciary Trust Company, and Vanguard/Morgan Growth Fund Inc." But the White House says that if you dare question Sammy's ethics, you are just a tarnisher to the shiny essence of Alito, you tarnisher, you.

It's sort of like promising your brother that you won't fuck anyone who ever fucked him and then you meet a hot blonde in a bar who you take back to your place, and during the foreplay, she says that you look just like your brother, who she fucked. And then you fuck her anyways. In the morning, you gotta look in the mirror and admit, "Well, fuck, guess I was full of shit on that promise." This ain't even to say the deep pit of shit you stepped in when you gotta face your brother, who's gonna find out, oh, hell, yeah, he's gonna find out. And you'll have to decide if you deserve the ass-kickin' you're gonna get.

Sammy Alito, though, he's an ethical man. On the Third Circuit Court, he had no problem forcing lower court judges off cases where there was an appearance of bias. Take the 1992 example of District Judge H. Lee Sarokin, who for eight years oversaw a tobacco litigation case, Haines v. Liggett Group. According to the November 1992 ABA Journal, Sarokin, ruling on a technical matter on document discovery in the case, was a bit too forceful in his language, saying, "[D]espite some rising pretenders, the tobacco industry may be the king of concealment and disinformation...All too often in the choice between the physical health of consumers and the financial well-being of business, concealment is chosen over disclosure, sales over safety, and money over morality" Which is like saying that if one sucks cocks, one is a cocksucker, but it was enough for the Third Circuit Court and Sammy Alito to force Sarokin off the case, perhaps rightly so, but this ain't about that action. It's about the man who was part of committing it.

The standard by which the Third Circuit Court ruled was "the appearance of impropriety," which seems pretty clear-cut. It was the same standard Alito and the Third Circuit used when they removed U.S. District Court Judge James Kelly from his assignment over a class action asbestos case that same year, according to the October 19, 1992 Pennsylvania Law Journal. It seems Kelly had attended a conference about the health dangers of asbestos. According to the decision to remove Kelly, "To put it succinctly, he attended a predominantly pro-plaintiff conference on a key merits issue, the conference was indirectly sponsored by the plaintiffs, largely with funding that he himself had approved; and his expenses were largely defrayed by the conference sponsors with those same court-approved funds." Again, cut and dried. But the appeals court wasn't passing judgment on Kelly's bias: "Although we believe that Judge Kelly acted with integrity at all times, we also believe that the circumstances surrounding his attendance at (a plaintiffs-oriented) conference created an appearance of partiality that required disqualification." So wrote Circuit Court Judge Edward Becker in a decision joined by Alito.

Let's get this straight: attend a conference connected with the case - disqualification. Have a financial stake in a company that's a defendant in a case you're judging - a-okay. Man, Alito is like duck-huntin' Antonin Scalia in his personal standard for "appearance of partiality."

Contradictions are part of life. We are never totally who we say we are, we are never totally who other people believe us to be. We are measured by our actions, and our motives are always open to questioning. The fundamentalist Christian who molests children. The megawealthy CEO who steals from the company. The righteous judge who lies.