Sam Alito watched blue states outsmart him — and he's 'big mad': legal analysts

Legal experts are mocking Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito after his fiery dissent in Thursday's Mifepristone ruling revealed just how angry he is that blue states have found a way around his decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

On a Slate podcast bonus episode of "Amicus" released Friday, host Mark Joseph Stern and legal scholar Madiba Dennie, author of "The Originalism Trap," dissected the dissents from Alito and fellow conservative Justice Clarence Thomas after the Supreme Court preserved telehealth access to the abortion pill mifepristone in a 7-2 emergency order.

"Let's turn to Justice Samuel Alito, whose dissent is slightly less crazy but way funnier because he's big mad," Stern said.

Dennie agreed, noting Alito's particular fury that more abortions are now happening in Louisiana than before Dobbs because of telehealth mifepristone access. "It seems like he really thought Dobbs was going to end abortion in red states forever, and he’s sore as hell that blue states outsmarted him," Dennie said.

"It was honestly pretty funny that he’s so appalled there are more abortions happening now than before Dobbs. It gives away the game a bit that this was never actually about restoring freedom to the states, as he claimed. It was just about ending abortion. And he’s upset that it didn’t do that," Dennie added.

Stern said Alito's dissent revealed his selective view of state sovereignty.

"In Alito’s view, red states have absolute freedom to persecute abortion providers and patients, while blue states have no authority to protect them," Stern said.

Dennie went further, drawing a historical parallel to pre-Civil War personal liberty laws, when free states refused to return enslaved people to slave states.

"Here, again, we have judges like Alito suggesting that unfree states should be able to reach into free states and impose their laws on everyone else—to impose their unfreedom across the whole country," she said.