Where Do Conservative Supreme Court Justices Get Their Information? |
Where Do Conservative Supreme Court Justices Get Their Information?
The recent oral arguments in an important voting rights case suggest that the right wing of the high court has a suspect media diet.
Thirteen years ago, Justice Antonin Scalia gave an unusually candid interview with New York magazine’s Jennifer Senior. (Candid by the standards of Supreme Court justices, that is, not by Scalia’s standards.) The then-dean of the court’s conservative wing discussed Richard Nixon, sex discrimination, and the metaphysical existence of Satan, among other things.
Perhaps the most enlightening topic was the justice’s media diet. “Where do you get your news?” Senior asked. “Well, we get newspapers in the morning,” Scalia replied. “I usually skim them. We just get The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times. We used to get The Washington Post, but it just … went too far for me. I couldn’t handle it anymore.”
The Journal, at the time, had the most prominent conservative editorial board among major newspapers, while the Times had an even more right-wing reputation. What’s wrong with the Post, Senior asked? “It was the treatment of almost any conservative issue,” Scalia explained. “It was slanted and often nasty. And, you know, why should I get upset every morning? I don’t think I’m the only one. I think they lost subscriptions partly because they became so shrilly, shrilly liberal.”
Scalia went on to explain that he got most of his news on the radio while driving back and forth to work. “Sometimes NPR,” he said, “but not usually.” His favorite radio program was by his “good friend” Bill Bennett, a prominent conservative pundit and former Reagan Cabinet member. “He has a wonderful talk show,” Scalia explained. “It’s very thoughtful. He has good callers. I think they keep off stupid people.”
That glimpse into how Scalia, one of the country’s most powerful people at the time, formed his daily worldview came to mind for me during Monday’s oral arguments in Watson v. Republican National Committee. The case involves a GOP legal challenge to a Mississippi election law that allows mail-in ballots to be counted as long as they are postmarked by Election Day and received by the state up to five days later. More than two dozen other states have similar laws.
The basic legal question—whether federal election laws preempt the Mississippi law and require ballots to be received on or before Election Day itself—is an important one for the upcoming 2026 midterms, and for future U.S. elections where voters can participate by mail. Unfortunately, a significant portion of the court’s conservative justices appear to either not understand how American elections work or actively believe in conspiracy theories surrounding them. It raises significant questions about where the justices get their information.
Justice Samuel Alito led the charge. In a somewhat muddled question, he asked Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stuart whether it was “legitimate for us to take into account Congress’s desire—Congress’s passage of the Election Day statutes for the purposes of combatting fraud or the appearance of fraud.” There is no indication that Congress enacted those statutes for that reason; Alito has a long history of reading his own policy preferences into federal election laws.
In the same breath, Alito also cited friend-of-the-court briefs that claimed “confidence in election outcomes can be seriously undermined if the apparent outcome of the election [on] the day after the polls close is radically flipped by the acceptance later of a big stash of ballots that flip the election.” Though couched in the terms of submitted briefs, Alito was making an unambiguous reference to election-fraud theories around recent presidential elections.
This phenomenon is known as the “blue shift” or the “red mirage,” depending on whom you ask. It is rooted in a basic fact of election administration: votes that are cast on Election Day are typically counted very quickly, while votes that are counted by mail........