Is Samuel Alito Preparing to Disrobe?
In this installment of Elie v. US, our justice correspondent explores the week’s big legal news, including a possible Alito retirement. Also, the anti-trans mob’s latest target: tight clothing.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has a new book coming out. It’s titled How Watching Fox News Made Me the Worst Version of Myself.
Just kidding, I don’t actually care what it’s called. (Fine. I can Google it for you. It’s called So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and the Country.) It’s my job to read such things and… I won’t read his book. They can’t make me. Life is entirely too short.
I bring it up because the book is scheduled to be released October 6, 2026. That’s a curious date. The Supreme Court starts its 2026–27 term on October 5, the first Monday of October. Alito’s book is set to drop the next day.
It sure feels like Alito doesn’t plan on having a real job the Tuesday his book launches and instead thinks he’ll be free to run around the country promoting it. By way of context, here are publication dates for the the last four sitting Supreme Court justices who released books:
Amy Coney Barrett, September 9, 2025
Neil Gorsuch, May 5, 2025
Ketanji Brown Jackson, September 4, 2024
Sonia Sotomayor, January 25, 2022 (a children’s book)
Sonia Sotomayor, September 3, 2019
It makes sense for the justices to release their books in September. You have all the attention on the upcoming term, but the justices are free to fly around the country, giving talks and doing interviews to promote their books. May also makes sense, because the court is no longer hearing cases then, just writing and editing opinions.
The justices are busy in October. Arguably too busy to sell a book.
The publication date of the book makes me think that Alito is planning to retire at the end of the Supreme Court’s current term, in July. That would give Trump, and the Republicans who still control the Senate, time to appoint and confirm his replacement before the midterm elections.
Alito watches TV. He reads the papers. While the Republicans are still favored to hang on to the Senate, it’s far from certain. Alito turns 76 in April. He’s accomplished most of the evil he set out to do, including overturning Roe v. Wade. With Republican poll numbers flagging, I don’t think he wants to roll the dice and be forced to hang around on the court should Republicans lose the Senate this fall.
The publication date of his book is a giant tell. I think he’s leaving while Republicans still have the political power to replace him with another Sam Alito who is 30 years younger.
Popular
“swipe left below to view more authors”Swipe →I hope I’m wrong about this. I don’t want Trump to be able to replace Alito with another Alito. He will likely retire by the end of Trump’s term anyway, but the best-case scenario would be for him to stay on out of the hubristic belief that Republicans will hold on to the Senate—and be wrong about that.
The Bad and the Ugly
- No matter what Tom Homan says, ICE is still on the ground in Minnesota, violating constitutional rights and threatening people with violence. It’s only a matter of time before they murder someone else.
- House Democrats are demanding that the Department of Homeland Security end warrantless home invasions.
- A federal judge temporarily blocked DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s attempts to bar members of Congress from touring ICE detention camps.
- Minnesota schools are suing DHS over its invasion of schools and abduction and harassment of children.
- Republicans in Arizona are fighting a Biden-era regulation that prevents mining uranium in the Grand Canyon. To recap: There are people who want to mine the Grand freaking Canyon for uranium. There are enough of those people that Biden had to make a whole-ass federal regulation—giving the canyon and the surrounding area “national monument” protection—to stop them. Yet, undeterred, those people are now fighting that regulation in court. I just don’t know what to do with this information.
Inspired Takes
- New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani took to The Nation website to endorse Kathy Hochul for governor. I’m not there yet. (Disclosure: I know one of her primary opponents, Antonio Delgado, personally, from law school). I haven’t forgotten her attempts to force Hector LaSalle onto the state’s highest court or her habit of governing as Cuomo-lite until just a few months ago. The sitting NYC mayor trying to make nice with the sitting governor in Albany does not move my needle.
- Two of my favorite broadcasters, Dean Obeidallah and Joy Reid, sat down with Laura Flanders in The Nation to talk about the abject failure of the mainstream media.
- The Boston Review hosted a forum on “How Not To Defeat Authoritarianism” (emphasis added) that excoriated the Democrats for their weak-sauce responses. It is fire.
Worst Argument of the Week
The Food and Drug Administration is targeting gender-affirming… garments. Specifically, Trump’s FDA sent letters to 12 companies that make or sell chest-compressing garments, warning them that their products are considered “medical devices” and will be regulated as such. The FDA warned that the companies’ operations could be shut down if they continue to “market them as a treatment for gender dysphoria.”
The war on transgender individuals now apparently includes tight clothing.
First of all, in case this needs to be said: Every single article of clothing is gender-affirming in some way. You think I like wearing pants? I do not. I would gladly leave my house in a kilt, commando-style, because that is just way more comfortable. I don’t, because cis-hetero men wearing skirts is frowned upon in my culture. Ditto roaming the streets sans boxers. But I don’t see the FDA warning Fruit of the Loom that its products are now medical devices.
The FDA’s threats are aimed not at what these products do (again, body-smushing garments are ubiquitous in our society) but who is wearing them and why. And that is a straight-up content-based restriction that violates the First Amendment. It cannot be the case that you are allowed to market chest-compressing undergarments to a cis woman who wants to play tennis but cannot market them to a trans man who… wants to play tennis. That is an unconstitutional restriction on expression.
It’s almost funny, in the way that fascists’ getting mad at something small is always kind of funny. But it’s also incredibly serious that these attacks on transgender people are so happily carried out by Trump’s FDA. Remember, the FDA also regulates actual drugs and medical treatments, including the hormone blockers and boosters that some trans people take. Treating trans people who want to take drugs differently from cis people who want to take the same drugs is the unconstitutional—and deeply hypocritical—precedent for all of these attacks.
I think if people understood that the right wing’s attack on hormones is just as stupid as the right wing’s attack on glorified Spanx, more people might support the concept that trans people should be treated equally under the law.
What I Wrote
Trump and the Republicans are going to try to rig the upcoming midterm elections. Their plans are out in the open. I argue that Democrats need a coordinated response to the Republicans’ coordinated attacks, and I have a pretty good idea for where to start.
In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos
A UK court ruled that stealing money in a video game can be treated like stealing money in real life. And I am 100 percent here for it.
The issue arose in the popular online game RuneScape. A developer, Andrew Lakeman, who worked for Jagex, the makers of RuneScape, allegedly used his access to the game to essentially hack the accounts of various players. He’s charged with stealing 705 billion “Gold” from 68 players.
Most games these days have two kinds of currencies: “in-game” currency and “premium” currency. In-game currency can generally be earned just by playing the game (defeating monsters, selling spare items, yada yada). Premium currency can generally be earned only by paying real-world money and buying the premium currency from the game’s developers. Sometimes games will allow you to earn some premium currency from playing the game, and sometimes games will allow you to sell premium currency for in-game currency, but it’s best to think of these two currencies as separate: In-game currency is earned with your time, premium currency earned with your wallet.
Nobody would dispute that stealing premium currency is theft, because it’s obvious that such currency has a real-world value, as evidenced by the fact that game developers charge for it and players pay for it. But “Gold” is RuneScape’s in-game currency. Most courts treat this currency as valueless. Lakeman, the former developer, argued that he could not be charged under the UK’s Theft Act because he only stole this valueless, in-game currency.
But a UK appellate court disagreed. The court ruled that each gold piece could be regarded as “property” of the players who earned them, even though the currency is functionally “infinite” because Jagex can just make more Gold whenever it wants.
This is the right decision. Because when you steal in-game currency from people, what you’re really stealing is time. Players put in a lot of time killing the monsters and farming the items and making Gold for their characters in the game. Stealing it is theft.
And “the market” knows that time is money, even in this case. Lakeman reportedly sold his ill-gotten Gold for around $750,000 of Bitcoin. Why would somebody buy in-game currency for real-world money? Well, because it takes a lot of time to amass 705 billion Gold in the game of RuneScape.
Now, if Lakeman had played RuneScape, defeated 68 players, and lifted 705 billion Gold off their dead corpses (which you can totally do in RuneScape), that would be fine. That’s just… playing the game. As has been said to me many times, while my character is lying dead, “Git gud, scrub.”
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