Alito, the hypocrite

States' rights for me, but not for thee. (Reuters) It's bad enough that Justice Alito is wrong so often, but it's worse that he doesn't even pretend to have any semblance of consistency.

Here he is, Monday, reading from the bench parts of his decision on juvenile sentencing:

Alito noted that 17-year-olds committed an average of 424 murders and non-negligent homicides per year between 2002 and 2010, and that Congress and 43 state legislatures 'have concluded that at least some of these murderers should be sentenced to prison without parole' while '28 States and the Federal Government have decided that for some of these offenders life without parole should be man­datory.'

'The majority of this Court now overrules these legislative judgments,' he wrote.

Gasp, the Supreme Court has overruled legislative judgements? I guess Alito was on the dissenting side of Citizen's United, right?

A day after the United States Supreme Court ruled that the federal government may not ban political spending by corporations or unions in candidate elections, officials across the country were rushing to cope with the fallout, as laws in 24 states were directly or indirectly called into question by the ruling.

Alito, of course, wasn't on the dissent in that case. And he doesn't give a shit about legislative judgement, since he's so quick to disregard it when it doesn't suit his ideology. Which would be fine if he didn't walk around pretending to give a damn.

Fact is, justices like Alito and Scalia and the rest of their cohort, and the entire conservative movement for that matter, only care about states' rights when those states agree with them.