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Its official line emphasizing “originalism” and “textualism” belies how predictably its picks track Republican views on regulation, presidential power, and religion.

When it invokes originalism or textualism, the court promises us that it’s moving away from living constitutionalism and balancing tests.

It’s such an elegant formulation of how doing strict textualism, to the peril of people, or strict originalism, to the peril of people, is not the job; that there was no one unitary, coherent, simple approach to doing this work.

In 2023, Alito sat for four hours of interviews for the Wall Street Journal, in a late July feature that dismissed the Alaska revelations as a “hit piece” and instead fluffed the justice as “the Supreme Court’s plain-spoken defender” and an “important justice” with a “distinctive interpretive method that is pragmatic yet rooted in originalism and textualism.”

For me, that was such a useful way to think about how factuality has been eroded by originalism, and textualism, and strict construction, or whatever the theory is, because it actually isn’t fact-based; it’s guess-based or maybe Ouija board–based or séance-based, just not based in any fact.