Justice Alito Says COVID-19 Put Americans’ Constitutional Rights To Test … And Many Failed
Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito, joining Fox News for an interview, reflected on the risks certain responses to the COVID-19 pandemic posed to the rights guaranteed to Americans by the United States Constitution.
In preparation for the Oct. 6 release of his new book, “So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country,” Alito spoke with “Fox News Sunday” host Shannon Bream to discuss some of the cases in his career and the application of his jurisprudence.
During the interview, Bream asked Alito about a Nov. 12, 2020, speech he delivered virtually to the Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention. The conservative appointee of former President George W. Bush had criticized the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions for resulting in “previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty.” While cautioning he was neither diminishing the virus’s real threat to public health nor determining if the restrictions “represent good public policy,” Alito stated it was an “indisputable statement of fact” that “we have never before seen restrictions as severe, extensive and prolonged as those experienced for most of 2020.” He had also characterized the restrictions as a “constitutional stress test.”
Critics accused Alito of being too partisan in his remarks.
In response to Bream’s question, the 76-year-old Alito doubled down and said the pandemic was a “stress test” of Americans’ constitutional rights.
“I think it was a stress test of our constitutional rights,” Alito said during the interview. “It put our loyalty to those constitutional rights, our dedication to those constitutional rights, to the test.”
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“One of the things that, unfortunately, it disclosed was that many people were willing to downgrade certain constitutional rights: the right to freedom of speech and the right to the free exercise of religion,” Alito reflected. “In particular, they were willing to make those secondary to other things.”
The case Bream referenced, Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley v. Steve Sisolak, Governor of Nevada, et al., resulted in the high court voting 5-4 to deny an emergency injunction request by the defendant, a rural Nevada church. The church’s case argued Democratic Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak’s order limiting the number of people who could come to worship services to 50 was a direct violation of their freedom of religion.
“I have spent countless hours praying on this myself and talking to faith leaders,” Sisolak had said during an April 2020 press conference, according to the Reno Gazette Journal. “My primary purpose is to keep people alive and stop the spread of this disease.
Alito issued a dissenting opinion pointing out the apparent hypocrisy of the Nevada state government, who closed down churches that violated pandemic lockdown regulations, yet allowed secular businesses like casinos, restaurants, and gyms to operate at 50% fire-code capacity.
“The example of the casinos, I thought, was telling, and the governor of Nevada at that time said the casinos are open,” Alito said. “And so people came back to Las Vegas, and there were pictures of people in the casinos, and they were not wearing masks but at the same time, the state had a very severe limit on the number of people who could attend a house of worship, no matter how big that house of worship was.”
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