Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has been lying in public for a long time. His attempt to blame his wife for flying an upside down American flag, a symbol of MAGA defiance, at his Virginia home shortly after the January 6 insurrection is only the latest in a series of high-profile prevarications dating back to his 2006 Senate confirmation hearing.

Nominated to the Supreme Court by George W. Bush to replace the retiring Sandra Day O’Connor, Alito’s confirmation was all but guaranteed as Republicans held a 55-seat majority in the upper chamber. Yet despite taking an oath to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” on day one of the four-day proceeding, Alito sought to portray himself as a judicial moderate, misrepresenting his positions on a host of critical issues.

First and foremost, Alito lied about his views on abortion and Roe v. Wade (1973), which he called an “an important precedent of the Supreme Court” that had “been on the books for a long time” and had been “reaffirmed” by the court, strengthening its value as settled law. Sixteen years later, with the court firmly in the hands of a hard-right majority, he showed his true colors, authoring the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion that overturned Roe, proclaiming that Roe “was egregiously wrong from the start,” and that its reasoning was “exceptionally weak” and caused “dangerous consequences” for the country.

Short of expanding the court, which is a long-term political project, there is at least one thing supporters of impartial justice can do. We can, and must, expose Alito’s mendacity and corruption at every opportunity.

Alito similarly shaded the truth at his confirmation hearing about his support for a broad-based interpretation of presidential immunity and the “unitary executive” theory that advocates for an all-powerful presidency—questions that loom large before the Supreme Court in the election-subversion case brought by Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith against Donald Trump that the court will decide by the end of its current term. Alito was also suspiciously evasive about his membership in a now-defunct Princeton University alumni group that opposed the admission of women and tried to limit the enrollment of minority students.

None of Alito’s confirmation-hearing posturing was convincing or surprising. Long before the hearing, Alito had earned a well-deserved reputation as an aggressively hardcore Republican partisan, serving as a deputy assistant attorney general assigned to the Office of Legal Counsel from 1985-87 during Ronald Reagan’s second term as president; working as the U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey from 1987 to 1990; and sitting as a federal appellate judge on D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals from 1990 to 2006.

As a federal judge, he was given the nickname “Strip-Search Sammy” for a dissenting opinion he penned in 2004 in a drug-raid appeal from Pennsylvania, in which he approved of the strip search of a 10-year-old girl who was not a suspect in the case. Although he claimed at his confirmation hearing that he “wasn’t happy” about what had happened to the child, he insisted his dissent was based solely on a technical application of the Fourth Amendment.

On the Supreme Court, Alito has operated very much in keeping with his........

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