Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito sat for a 90-minute interview with journalist James Rosen — published in Politico — and offered a rare window into how he views his late colleague Antonin Scalia's unfinished work on the bench. The headline moment: Alito's quiet admission that Scalia, who died unexpectedly in his sleep in early 2016 at age 79, would barely recognize the country he left behind.
"He would have been appalled at so much."
Alito did not elaborate. He didn't need to.
The 75-year-old justice, who authored the Dobbs v. Jackson decision overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, went further in describing what Scalia's absence has meant — not just for the Court, but for the conservative legal project Scalia spent decades building.
"Even since Nino died, things are so different. I so often wish he were still here. He started so much and it would have been good to have him around to see it to completion."
That word — "completion" — carries weight. Alito isn't eulogizing. He's mapping unfinished terrain.
Scalia's death in early 2016 opened one of the most consequential political battles in modern Supreme Court history. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell held the seat vacant for more than a year, blocking President Barack Obama from filling it. Donald Trump, who became the presumptive Republican nominee just months after Scalia's passing and won the general election that November, appointed Neil Gorsuch as Scalia's successor.
That single appointment preserved the ideological trajectory Scalia had charted. What followed — including Brett Kavanaugh's bruising 2018 confirmation hearings, during which Christine Blasey Ford accused him of sexual assault, an accusation he denied — cemented a 6-3 conservative majority that has reshaped American law at a pace not seen in generations.
McConnell's gamble was, in hindsight, the most consequential act of Senate leadership in a generation. The seat didn't just stay conservative. As The Daily Beast reported, it became the fulcrum for everything that came after — Dobbs, religious liberty cases, and the broader restoration of originalist jurisprudence that Scalia pioneered from his appointment in 1986 until his death three decades later.
Alito's use of "Nino" — Scalia's nickname among friends and family — signals something the interview's clinical details don't fully capture. These weren't just colleagues who shared a judicial philosophy. Alito is speaking as someone who watched a friend build a framework and then inherited the responsibility of carrying it forward.
Rosen noted that one of Scalia's children expressed a similar sentiment — that the timing of Scalia's death spared him from witnessing much that would have upset him. Alito apparently agreed.
It's a striking thought. The justice who revolutionized conservative legal reasoning, who wrote dissents so sharp they read like blueprints for future majorities, died just before the political world cracked open in ways no one anticipated. He never saw Trump's presidency. He never saw his own dissents become the foundation for Alito's majority opinion in Dobbs. He never saw the Court achieve what he'd spent his career arguing it should.
And he never saw the cultural backlash that followed.
The conservative legal movement is in its strongest institutional position in modern memory. A 6-3 majority. Alito and his conservative colleagues have greenlit the vast majority of Trump's policies. The originalist framework Scalia championed is no longer a dissenting theory — it's the operating system.
But none of that has come without friction. The 2022 leak of Alito's draft Dobbs opinion to Politico was an institutional earthquake — the first time a full draft Supreme Court opinion had been disclosed before its official release. Notably, Rosen's 90-minute interview with Alito apparently either didn't address the leak or Rosen chose not to include it. That silence is its own kind of editorial decision.
Subsequent leaks revealed internal disagreements among justices over ethics rules and exposed a confidential memo in which Chief Justice John Roberts pushed to grant Trump broad immunity from prosecution. The Court's internal deliberations, once treated as sacrosanct, have become another front in the political war surrounding the institution.
Scalia operated in a different era — one where the Court's battles were fierce but largely contained within its marble walls. The justices argued in opinions, not through anonymous sources. The institution's legitimacy was assumed, not polled.
Alito's refusal to specify what Scalia would have found appalling is the most interesting part of the remark. The vagueness is doing real work. It lets the statement travel in every direction — toward the coarsening of political discourse, toward institutional decay, toward a culture that has lurched in directions Scalia spent his career resisting.
Rosen framed the broader context by writing that Scalia would have been less enthusiastic about American politics, which have grown "coarser and more polarized than ever before." That tracks with what most honest observers would acknowledge, regardless of ideology. But it also understates what's actually changed.
Scalia believed the Constitution meant what it said when it was ratified — and that judges who invented new meanings were the real threat to democratic self-governance. That argument hasn't gotten easier to make. It's gotten easier to prove. Every institutional norm that's crumbled since 2016, every leak, every political circus dressed up as a confirmation hearing, every attempt to delegitimize the Court because it reached conclusions the left doesn't like — all of it vindicates the originalist warning that when courts become political actors, politics will come for the courts.
Scalia saw that coming before most conservatives had the vocabulary for it.
Alito's reflection isn't nostalgia. It's an inventory. He described Scalia as someone who "started so much" — meaning the project is ongoing, the scaffolding is up, and the workers are still on site. Alito, at 75, is one of those workers. The question is whether the Court can finish what Scalia started while the institution itself faces pressures he never had to navigate — pressures that come not from legal opponents but from a political culture that has decided the judiciary is just another arena for power struggles.
Scalia would have had something to say about that. Something sharp, something quotable, something that cut through the noise with the precision of a man who believed words had fixed meanings and institutions had fixed purposes.
Instead, it falls to Alito to say it plainly: things are so different now. And the man who mapped the path forward isn't here to walk it.
