Justice Alito mocks Prince Harry for Roe v. Wade criticism
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has mocked Prince Harry and the “string of foreign leaders” who attacked the US for scrapping Roe v. Wade.
Alito, 72, drew laughter with his scathing speech at a conference on religious liberty in Italy, his first public remarks since the landmark 1973 abortion rights decision was overturned.
“What really wounded me — what really wounded me — was when the Duke of Sussex addressed the United Nations and seemed to compare the decision whose name may not be spoken with the Russian attack on Ukraine,” Alito said in a sarcastic tone of Harry.
The exiled UK royal’s speech — which cited “the rolling back of constitutional rights” in the US as proof of “a painful year” — was far from the only non-American whose criticism Alito dismissed.
“I had the honor this term of writing I think the only Supreme Court decision in the history of that institution that has been lambasted by a whole string of foreign leaders who felt perfectly fine commenting on American law,” Alito said.
“One of these was former Prime Minister Boris Johnson — but he paid the price,” Alito joked of the UK leader who has been forced to step down after an overwhelming show of no confidence in him.
The failed UK leader had called the Supreme Court’s ruling “a big step backwards.”
“But others are still in office,” Alito noted, name-checking French President Emmanuel Macron as well as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who called the decision “horrific.”
Alito’s speech on July 21 in Rome was previously unannounced, and only emerged after the hosts, the University of Notre Dame Law School, posted a video of it online on Thursday.
In it, he told the audience that he was one of a number of US judges who still “cling to the belief that it matters what the Constitution says and what it does not say.”
