Alito Warns COVID Era Revealed How Quickly Constitutional Rights Can Be Downgraded

By Tim Hains | Real Clear Politics

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito with FNC’s Shannon Bream on “FOX News Sunday”:

SHANNON BREAM, HOST, “FOX NEWS SUNDAY”: OK, let’s get back to the book, because it’s a collection of speeches and lectures that you have done over time.

One of the first ones I flipped to see if it was there was a speech you gave in November 2020 in the midst of COVID, where a lot of things were topsy-turvy, lives were turned upside down, businesses, churches. You talked in that speech about the fact that casinos were open, clubs were open in places like Nevada, and yet people were having a really difficult time getting to their houses of worship.

There were people who reacted to that speech and said that it was angry, that it was partisan. What did you make of their reaction then? I mean, you said it was a stress test, the pandemic was, of our constitutional rights.

SAMUEL ALITO, U.S. SUPREME COURT ASSOCIATE JUSTICE: I think it was a stress test of our constitutional rights.

In other words, it put our loyalty to those constitutional rights, our dedication to those constitutional rights to the test. And one of the things that, unfortunately, it disclosed was that many people were willing to downgrade certain constitutional rights, the right to freedom of speech and the right to the free exercise of religion in particular.

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