Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer Fires Back at Justice Alito Slamming Him for ‘Inflammatory’ Piece on TX Abortion Law: ‘Dishonesty and Obfuscation’

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Last month the Supreme Court declined to block the Texas abortion ban from going into effect. The Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer blasted the conservative majority on the court and wrote they were “so eager” to nullify Roe v. Wade, “it didn’t even wait for oral arguments.”

Weeks later, Justice Samuel Alito delivered a speech that, in part, addressed criticisms of the Supreme Court — including Serwer’s.

He read from the above line in Serwer’s article and called it “false and inflammatory” to say they “nullif[ied] Roe v. Wade.”

Here is Justice Alito condemning @AdamSerwer’s Atlantic article about the Texas abortion order as “false,” “inflammatory,” and “ridiculous.” https://t.co/daAwrZwzmI pic.twitter.com/lK4OoxYbbT

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) September 30, 2021

Alito read from the ruling, including the part stating “this order is not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’s law.”

“So the statement is flatly wrong, and the suggestion that we should have held oral argument is ridiculous,” he added.

Serwer responded in an article Tuesday titled “By Attacking Me, Justice Alito Proved My Point.”

He said Alito’s speech showed how the Supreme Court’s conservative majority “wants to act politically without being seen as political, and expects the public to silently acquiesce to its every directive without scrutiny, criticism, or protest.”

Alito’s complaint about my description of the substance of the Court’s ruling was just as meritless as his grousing about my description of the process by which it was delivered. The practical effect of the Supreme Court’s September decision was to deny Texans the right to decide when to end a pregnancy, and many—those who can afford it—are going out of state for treatment. Anti-abortion activists are so delighted with the law’s impact that they are trying to dissuade people from suing under the law, because that might subject it to substantive review by the courts more swiftly. The whole idea of the law was to prevent women in Texas from being able to obtain abortions for as long as possible. It would be wrong to say that Roe has been overturned, but it is beyond dispute to say that its protections are no longer in effect in Texas. In a word, it has been nullified.

Serwer wrote that Alito “wanted to act like a GOP-primary candidate” and even said the “dishonesty” from the Supreme Court justice was “below the level of what you would find in a Facebook thread from an anti-vax group” or “a style of argument that belongs at a Thanksgiving dinner with exasperated blood relatives in New Jersey.”

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