Justice Samuel Alito's Confirmation Speech and the USA's Forgotten Values

Samuel Alito

One must be careful what one says. Oh, wait, never mind, for public officials are rarely held to account. That is because much of American government, the protection of our liberties, depends as much on our cultural values as on the Constitution’s written text. 

In his opening statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 9, 2006, Judge Samuel Alito reiterated a basic legal principle every school child in the United States of America has heard:

“No person in this country, no matter how high or powerful, is above the law, and no person in—in this country is beneath the law.”

Judge Alito obviously needed to say that; otherwise, no one would have voted to confirm him to the Supreme Court. Sadly, that principle appears nowhere in the Constitution of the United States; its power depends entirely on whether we, as a people, believe it. 

Eighteen years later, securely in power, holder of a lifetime appointment, Alito who voted for the majority opinion in Trump v. United States. In that case, President Donald Trump protested that he should be immune from criminal charges. As they resolved that case, the six conservative judges all voted to provide the president of the United States with absolute immunity when conducting his or her constitutional powers, a degree of immunity (“presumptive immunity”) for other official acts, and no immunity for private actions.

The more conservative judges disagreed a bit about the extent of the presidential immunity that they invented, while the more liberal Justice Sotomayor argued that the court’s decision created a “law-free zone around the President.” That “law-free zone” places one person – the President of the United States – above the law – at least some of the time.

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No doubt, many people believe that the president does require legal protection against harassing criminal charges.  Criminal charges might, they think, distract the president from his duties.  Nevertheless, we have the principle that I learned in high school, and which Judge Alito affirmed during his confirmation speech: “No person in this country, no matter how high or powerful, is above the law.” Regardless of the decision’s debatable merits, the decision to offer any kind of presidential immunity crushes that great moral principle to dust.

Judge Alito’s 2006 speech presaged the danger of living in a nation’s whose cultural norms slowly crumble, step-by-step, as an apathetic nation worries about the price of gasoline or the supply of eggs in the grocery store’s dairy section. It is one thing for public figures to pledge to follow our ideals of liberty, freedom, and equality. Those ideals mean nothing unless government officials are, at the least, held open to massive public shame when they destroy our most precious values. Unfortunately, the nation seems to have forgotten what Judge Alito affirmed so many years ago, and never held either him, or his colleagues, to account.

To understand the present, we must remember the past.

by William D. Harpine

Copyright ©2026 by William D. Harpine

Image: United States Supreme Court, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons