A decision by Justice Sonia Sotomayor to take 12 minutes of the court’s time on Thursday to read her dissent in a 6-3 ruling that makes it significantly harder for asylum seekers who traveled through Mexico and South America to enter the US provoked Justice Sam Alito to take an unseemly potshot at her, which stunned court regulars.
According to MS NOW legal analyst Lisa Rubin, arch-conservative Alito sat and listened to a very “calm” Sotomayor read her dissent, with Rubin pointing out, “That is certainly not unusual.”
“But here there was a moment of tension between Justices Sotomayor, with her dissent and Justice Alito, who wrote the majority opinion here,” she elaborated. “Producer Peggy Helman, who is in the court for the reading of all of these decisions, said that Justice Alito said in response out loud, ‘There's much I would have added if I had known a dissent would be read from the bench.’”
“She [Helman] said that people in the Supreme Court, in the gallery gasped when he said that because this is a group of people that, for all of their differences in terms of legal, interpretive methodology or even the outcome of cases, they like to make it seem as if they get a long; that they are all just rowing in the same direction, trying to do their job to uphold the rule of law” Rubin reported.
“Even when their conceptions of what the rule of law is differs, that very obvious public fracture between the two of them was one that was surprising even to the most veteran court watchers in the room today,” she added.