Yesterday after I posted about Justice Alito’s decision to refer Orly Taitz’s bizarre appeal to the rest of the court , I learned that it’s actually standard procedure to refer a case when an applicant has already applied to and been rejected one justice (Clarence Thomas in this instance). They do this to prevent the applicant for going from one justice to the next and to the next after that. To be sure, I read Alito’s “Does anybody else want to do something with this?” to mean that he himself was interested, but I may be over-reading. I think given that this is what happens whenever someone tries to justice-shop at the court, we should give Alito the benefit of the doubt on this one.
Photograph by Mark Wilson/Getty Images News.
