While the Supreme Court’s 2024-2025 term is winding down, Associate Justice Samuel Alito is not.

On June 6, the George W. Bush appointee participated in a sit-down interview with the Hoover Institution’s Peter Robinson. Released on Wednesday, the roughly hour-long exchange covered a variety of issues relevant America’s ongoing political discourse.

From the importance of maintaining free speech in society to the weaponization of nationwide injunctions, here are the most insightful remarks from one of the Supreme Court’s most senior justices.

History of Originalism

After alluding to the activist nature of the Supreme Court under former Chief Justice Earl Warren, Alito provided a brief overview of the originalist movement that sprung up in the years following. He specifically highlighted the views of intellectual thought leaders such as former Justice Antonin Scalia, former Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, and Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese — all of whom he credited as being the movement’s “three pioneers.”

“What they argued is basically that the Constitution is a text and it should be read basically the way other texts are read. We read the words, they’re understandable. The English language hasn’t changed that much since the late 18th century. We can figure out what it means, where it refers to legal concepts, established legal principles. We can explore what they were understood to mean at the time, and that’s the way it should be interpreted,” Alito said. “So, it was an effort to provide a structured, disciplined, and restrained way of reading the Constitution.”

Need for a ‘Colorblind’ Constitution

During a conversation on past SCOTUS decisions related to race, Robinson referenced the high court’s prior rulings upholding the use of affirmative action in college admissions and how the majority in those cases effectively contended that the Constitution was not colorblind. After discussing these prior decisions, Alito noted how the Court later “corrected” itself in 2023 by deeming affirmative action policies unconstitutional, and that America’s founding document does, in fact, not treat individuals differently based on race.

“I think that our Constitution is colorblind … How are we gonna hold together if we don’t regard each other simply as fellow human beings, as fellow Americans, and judge people based on their individual characteristics?” Alito said.

Robinson probed further, asking the justice if it “is unconstitutional for us to draw distinctions among our fellow citizens on the basis of race, full stop.”

Alito replied, “Yes, absolutely. I think that’s the core principle with the equal protection clause on the 14th Amendment. And I think it’s essential for the well-being of our country.”

In Defense of Religious Liberty

When the conversation shifted to the subject of religious liberty, Alito expressed disappointment that support for such freedoms “has cratered in the last 20-25 years.” He contrasted the wide bipartisan support within Congress for legislation passed and signed into in the mid-1990s to “provide more protection” for religious liberty and the nationwide hostility Indiana faced for trying to pass similar legislation in 2015.

Alito emphasized that while public support for it has declined, the “protection of religious liberty is required by our Constitution.”

“And it’s, again, like equality; it is essential for the well-being of the country,” Alito said.

Doing What’s Right

Following up on their conversation about religious liberty, Robinson asked Alito how the Supreme Court grapples with ruling on cases related to the subject if public support for it is “cratering.” The justice said that it’s important for the high court to “stand up for the Constitution,” adding that, “There’s a reason why we’re not elected.”

“We are not supposed to do what is popular, we’re supposed to do what is right. We’re supposed to interpret the Constitution and figure out what it means and then apply the Constitution,” Alito said. “We’re basically a democratic country, but the framers want to put some restraint on things that people might do during a particular area because they’re caught up in the emotions that are triggered by the events of the day. So, we have to stand firm on this, and I think we have done a pretty good job on it, but we have to keep it up because challenges will … continue to come.”

Free Speech and Government Censorship

Robinson’s discussion with the Bush appointee turned to the subject of free speech. After reading prior statements by Alito defending such a right, Robinson asked the justice “what kind of work needs to take place in the law schools, in the legal journals, and among scholars who know each other” to support pro-speech justices on the Court. Alito remarked that they “need all the support that [they] can get,” and expressed concerns about the lack of free speech protections on U.S. college campuses.

“What is going on there should ring some alarm bells,” Alito said. “A lot of speakers who say unpopular things are disrupted. When I talk to recent law graduates, law students … if they’re conservatives, they say, ‘I didn’t feel free to speak out when I was in law school. I had to watch everything that I said. I was afraid that I was gonna be harassed or intimidated.'”

The Bush appointee went on to discuss the collusion between social media companies and the Biden administration to censor Americans’ speech online.

He specifically referenced a case decided by SCOTUS last year called Murthy v. Missouri, in which a majority of justices dismissed a lawsuit brought by several medical professionals alleging this government-Big Tech censorship alliance violated their First Amendment rights. In that case, Alito said, “the Court missed the boat.”

Biden administration officials “put a lot of pressure on Facebook not to depart from the position that the government wanted to promote. That’s very dangerous,” Alito said. “Interestingly, Mark Zuckerberg later has said that he regrets that they gave in to the government pressure as much as they did. So, that’s something that we have to be concerned with going forward — manipulation of social media.”

The Flaws of Bostock

Robinson asked Alito about the Supreme Court’s 2019 Bostock v. Clayton County case, in which Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch joined the Democrat appointees in shoehorning so-called “gender identity” into the Civil Rights Act’s Title VII protections. In reference to Gorsuch and Alito’s diverging opinions in the case, Robinson pressed, “How can it be that originalism, fidelity to the meaning of the text, can produce two such different results?”

Alito said that “reasonable minds don’t always agree” and praised Gorsuch as a “great justice,” but noted that they “disagreed very strongly in that case.”

“I would say that the majority read those words [in the Civil Rights Act] mechanically and did not take into account the context which requires … us to ask, ‘What did Congress mean when it adopted that in 1964?'” Alito said. “And I think once you consider that, it’s perfectly plain that discrimination on the basis of sex at that time was understood by members of Congress and would be understood by the general public … to say this prohibits discriminating against women or discriminating against men.”

Robinson interjected, saying, “For the simple reason that transgenderism had never entered anybody’s head before.”

Alito replied, “Transgenderism, no, was not even a thing, really. It was not well established at all in 1964.”

Nationwide Injunctions

Toward the end of his interview with the justice, Robinson asked Alito about the issue of lower court judges issuing nationwide injunctions unilaterally blocking presidents from enacting executive policies — an apparent reference to leftists’ ongoing judicial coup against the Trump administration. While the Hoover policy fellow acknowledged that the executive can’t rule “unquestioned by executive order, simply by issuing fiats,” he noted how “it likewise cannot be the case that each” of the country’s more than 670 federal district court judges “is permitted on his or her own to thwart the policy of a democratically elected chief executive.”

“So, what do you do? How does one think this through? This is not easy,” said Robinson, to which Alito replied, “It is not easy. That is a problem that we have confronted, increasingly over the past six, seven, eight years, and that continues.”

The Bush appointee opined that what’s “sparked” the issue is “the great difficulty of getting legislation enacted by Congress.” He noted how the “Constitution deliberately sets up a law-making procedure that is time consuming and laborious,” and that “as the difficulty of getting legislation passed has increased, the presidents have increasingly looked to see what they can do on their own.”

Alito referenced 2014 remarks by then-President Barack Obama, in which the Illinois Democrat said he was prepared to use his “phone” and “pen” to address public policy issues should Congress fail to act on them. The justice detailed how this expansive use of executive power “increased” under President Joe Biden, citing “a number of cases” that came before SCOTUS “involving the unilateral exercise of executive power by the Biden administration.”

Alito contrasted the number of emergency applications made to the Supreme Court during Biden’s entire presidency to the first few months of the second Trump administration. “By my count,” he said, “we had 14 emergency applications filed by the solicitor general during the Biden years. And now, during the first [five] months of the Trump administration … the graph keeps going up and up.”

“A district judge [will say], ‘This is unlawful. I order you to stop, and I order you not only not to do this to the parties who [are] before me, I order you not to do this at all anywhere in the country — a universal injunction,” Alito said. This “preliminary injunction, it will be in place through the entire duration of the litigation, which may take two or three years before it could come up to us.”

Executive Power

Robinson pressed Alito on presidents’ power and the notion of “independent agencies.” That is, that there are federal departments outside of the president’s purview.

While the justice didn’t go into details about any specific case, he argued that “the general rule is the president is given the executive power.”

“I think there’s general agreement the vast majority of the executive branch is under the president’s control, and the president can appoint the cabinet officers and other political appointees,” Alito said. “There’s the issue of whether these independent agencies have a different status.”