A new ethics scandal involving another GOP megadonor could deepen an emerging divide on the Supreme Court.

Justice Samuel Alito published a furious op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday night attempting to preemptively rebut a forthcoming ProPublica article about his alleged ethics violations. Hours later, the ProPublica story dropped, revealing that the justice took an undisclosed fishing trip with Paul Singer, a billionaire hedge fund manager and Republican donor with extensive business before the Supreme Court. Singer flew Alito to Alaska on his private jet, a flight that likely cost more than $100,000, and put him up at a luxury resort; the justice failed to report any of these gifts on his annual disclosure form. Several years later, Alito sided with Singer in a major case that scored Singer’s company $2.4 billion.

On Wednesday’s bonus episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed this latest ethics breach, the seething reaction it engendered among conservatives, and the ongoing impact of this rolling ethics scandal on the Supreme Court as a whole. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: The ProPublica story makes it really clear that when Paul Singer was at law school, he looked around and thought: “This is all a bunch of crap. I could a buy a court, too.” Like, this is actually part of the plan. He’s been plowing money into the Federalist Society and the Manhattan Institute. This is not a guy who just happened to sort of be interested in judicial doings. This is a guy whose plan was to reshape the court!

Mark Joseph Stern: In that way, this is a mirror image of the Harlan Crow–Clarence Thomas story. Harlan Crow had this plan to purchase enough lawmakers to fundamentally change American government. And a few years into Thomas’ tenure on the court, this right-wing think tank set up a meet-cute between Crow and Thomas, and they hit it off and became great friends. Here, Sam Alito gets put on the court, and a few years later, Leonard Leo arranges a meet-cute between him and Paul Singer—another GOP mega-donor!

There’s a beautiful symmetry here. And it’s important to note that Singer is not just some rich rando who inherited a fortune from, like, a cosmetics company. He is a predatory hedge fund business guy who spends massive sums to enshrine far-right policy into law. He looked around and thought, “all right, which justice can I buy?” And Leonard Leo, head of the Federalist Society, said: “Oh, I’ve got an answer for you—Samuel Alito!”

Lithwick: It’s like the oligarch Big Brothers program for underprivileged jurists who just want to live large on the hog.

Stern: We should be clear that the pioneer of this was Antonin Scalia. He was the guy who went to so many hunting lodges and resorts and fishing expeditions on his rich friends’ dime. It turns out he, too, went to Alaska with Paul Singer on a private jet and failed to disclose it! It’s funny: Thomas and Alito have both said: “I was just following what my colleagues were doing, my colleagues set the precedent.” Well, your colleague here was Nino Scalia—not exactly a guy known for following hard and fast ethics rules.

Lithwick: In all these stories, it’s easy to keep losing Leonard Leo. But he’s like the great human connection machine. And his response to the ProPublica story is so classic. I just want to remind listeners that when Leo was asked to comment on why he was giving money to Ginni Thomas through Kellyanne Conway, his answer was that he wanted to protect the Thomases’ privacy. His response to the ProPublica story is not much better.

Stern: So Leo first says, basically: “You’d have to be an absolute moron to think that getting wined and dined by billionaires would change any justice’s vote.” Then he’s like: “But just in case you do think that, RBG, Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor did this stuff too! So if my guys are corrupt, their guys have to be corrupt. But really, none of them are corrupt because this ProPublica stuff is all just a hit job.” And he closes—and this is a direct quote: “We all should wonder whether this recent rash of ProPublica stories questioning the integrity of only conservative Supreme Court Justices is bait for reeling in more dark money from woke billionaires who want to damage this Supreme Court and remake it into one that will disregard the law by rubber stamping their disordered and highly unpopular cultural preferences.”

Lithwick: It’s always projection, right? The hilarity of hearing “dark money from woke billionaires” from the guy who was connecting un-woke billionaires to justices for travel and influence. It’s amazing the level of projection. I do want you address this question of “disordered and highly unpopular” preferences. It’s very Trumpy. Would you like to interpret that for us?

Stern: He’s saying Democrats and liberals are freaks, perverts, and weirdos. This term “disordered” comes up over and over again in briefing and decisions about LGBTQ issues and, to a lesser extent, reproductive freedom. You hear these arguments that trans people are just “disordered,” that gay people’s desire to marry shouldn’t be celebrated because it’s a “disordered” desire. Leo is basically giving a giant middle finger to everybody on the left, including judges, who support the human rights of same-sex couples, and transgender children, and women. He’s saying those folks don’t have a legitimate place in the American experiment.

Lithwick: I guess this just brings me back to what I’ve been saying from the jump. I don’t care where Sam Alito goes on vacation. I don’t care that Harlan Crow builds a petting zoo for Clarence Thomas in the backyard. What I care about is that there is a machine that seats justices at the court, and keeps other justices off the court, and that billions of dollars flood into this machine. For folks who didn’t catch it yesterday, Leonard Leo helped Ron DeSantis pick his state Supreme Court justices. Leo is the Hamburglar, he’s running around stealing American rights and freedoms, and we’re like, “oh yeah, that guy. Let’s get a lengthy statement from him about how bad liberals are.” What the hell? That guy’s the story! He’s the story!

Mark, do you have any reason to believe that some of this stuff is pushing some of the justices who might be completely aligned with the Leonard Leo project, but don’t like the stench? We’ve seen some moments in which Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch, in tandem with the chief justice, modulating what we thought was an extreme and pretty tight 6–3 supermajority going into the end of the term.

Stern: Look, I don’t want to say the court has moderated. This court remains an extremely conservative on issues that the justices care deeply about, like doing away with affirmative action, attacking the administrative state, and enshrining the right to discriminate into the law of religious freedom. I think they’re going to stick together on that stuff. But then there are these bigger swings like the Indian Child Welfare Act case, the Medicare case, and the Voting Rights Act case. It seems like, in those cases, some of the other conservatives are being pushed away by Thomas and Alito. But what if Thomas an and Alito were really persuasive and conducted themselves admirably—like, I don’t know, tried not to be corrupt? Tried to act as though they cared how the court is viewed in the eyes of the country? I think you can envision a court where Alito and Thomas present themselves as principled, hardcore ideological conservatives who pull Donald Trump’s justices into their orbit, and that just hasn’t happened. Instead, it seems like Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett have drifted further away from the orbit of Alito and Thomas.

Lithwick: Kavanaugh and Barrett are also young justices. They want to be on the court for the next 30 years. They don’t want to blow everything up today. So we really are seeing a divide.

Stern: That’s why you have Ron DeSantis coming out and saying: “I’m not a huge fan of Trump’s justices. I would rather appoint people like Alito and Thomas.” Because there is a difference. And the more that Thomas and Alito look like crooks, there’s going to be a reaction from the other conservatives. They’re always going to have the chief justice standing there with his arms wide open saying: “Oh, you want an alternative? Well, that’s what I’m here for. I’m John Roberts, and I live for this. You want a narrowly crafted compromise that inches the law to the right? I’m on it. You want a surprise, centrist victory that simply preserves the status quo while making progressives feel good? I can cook that up for you.” John Roberts knows how to do this. And for Kavanaugh and Barrett, and maybe even Gorsuch, in times of crisis and uncertainty, that can look a whole lot more appealing than the nihilism offered by Alito and Thomas.