10 years after, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito makes his case

WASHINGTON — The issue before the Supreme Court was a federal ban on hovercraft inside national parks, and Justice Samuel Alito was in a huff.

Despite special concessions that apply to Alaska, an appeals court had upheld the hovercraft ban there, even on land the federal government doesn't own. The court's reasoning didn't make sense to Alito, and he suspected the Justice Department lawyer defending the ban agreed.

"Why don't you concede that it's wrong?" Alito asked Assistant Solicitor General Rachel Kovner during oral argument last month. "It's a ridiculous interpretation, is it not?"

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The query was vintage Alito, as scores of Supreme Court advocates can attest. On a bench laden with long-winded orators and charismatic performers, he speaks softly — but with an incisive kick.

Ten years into his tenure on the high court, Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. remains the darling of conservatives and the bane of liberals. His substitution for Sandra Day O'Connor in 2006 represented the court's most significant shift since Clarence Thomas replaced Thurgood Marshall in 1991. In nearly all respects, he has been as advertised.

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Without Alito, the court likely would not have upheld a ban on late-term abortions in 2007, obliterated campaign spending rules for corporations in 2010 or perhaps even struck down a key section of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. This year, he appears poised to take the lead in limiting public employee unions' ability to collect fees from non-members.

"He is the no-surprise justice," says William Yeomans, a professor at American University's Washington College of Law. "He is very much the product of the conservative legal movement."

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Alito has had a major impact beneath the radar, at least compared to the more doctrinaire Thomas and the more bombastic Antonin Scalia. His votes in favor of religious freedom benefit some liberal causes, such as a Muslim woman's right to wear a headscarf at work, as well as many conservative ones. Associates say he takes an open-minded, objective approach to the cases that cross his chambers.

“He doesn’t have a grand theory that he’s trying to advance," says Benjamin Horwich, who served as a law clerk for both O'Connor and Alito in the 2005-06 term. "He is willing to think carefully about issues that others … simply sort of accept as axioms."

Horwich went on to argue 10 cases before the high court as an assistant solicitor general before entering private practice. Alito's questions, he says, "were the questions you would dread as an advocate, because they were darn sure the hardest ones to answer.”

President George W. Bush listens to Samuel Alito speak after announcing him as his choice to replace departing Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on Oct. 31, 2005.  Joe Raedle, Getty Images

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Conservative team player

Cast originally in the shadow of Chief Justice John Roberts — President George W. Bush's other nominee, who arrived at the court four months earlier — Alito, 65, has carved a powerful niche for himself over the past decade.

Among the five justices nominated by Republican presidents, his vote may be the most reliably conservative — more pragmatic than Scalia and Thomas, more predictable than Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Alito landed where conservatives expected on virtually all the major cases of the past decade: against abortion, same-sex marriage, racial preferences, religious discrimination, gun control, campaign finance restrictions, defendants' rights, labor rights and minority voting rights.

In 2014, he wrote the 5-4 decision exempting Hobby Lobby and other closely held businesses with religious objections from the Affordable Care Act's "contraceptive mandate." Last year, he authored the 5-4 ruling that upheld states' use of a controversial sedative in lethal injections, despite claims from dissenters that it was akin to being "burned at the stake." ("Outlandish rhetoric," Alito responded.)