What's in a Scalia-tini?
Plus: Fingers Regulatory Roulette!
This week, ProPublica dropped a three-byline bombshell about the brazen corruption of Federalist Society anti-democracy stormtrooper and current Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito. The story revolves around a series of luxury Alaskan fishing expeditions Alito took with Republican megadonors in the Aughts, one of whom, hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer, later won a $2.4 billion SCOTUS case from which Alito did not recuse himself, instead ruling in Singer’s favor. It’s a damning exposé of the highest court in the land’s cartoonish graft in the same tradition as the multi-part investigation into Clarence “Walmart Parking Lot Enjoyer” Thomas’ shameful supplication to this country’s capital class that the nonprofit newsroom published earlier this year, and I urge you to read it in full.1
When you do, you’ll encounter a curious photograph at the story’s conclusion, an edited version of which I’ve included above. What you see there is dead shithead/former SCOTUS justice Antonin Scalia (who reportedly accepted and didn’t disclose similar trips, lol) mixing up a batch of martinis on a fishing boat floating near Alaska’s Hubbard Glacier in 2005. A fishing guide told ProPublica that the glasses in front of him are being chilled with “chunks [chiseled] off an iceberg”—a bit on-the-nose as far as metaphors for the conservative judiciary project to exploit every inch of the environment for private gain, if you ask me, but sure. The bottle in Scalia’s grubby paws is obviously Grey Goose vodka, based on the unmistakable light-blue label accents and frosted glass. But what is that green bottle on the table in front of him?