‘Appearance of Impropriety’: Justice Alito’s Wife Leases Land to Fossil Fuel Company

With questions about the ethics of Supreme Court justices littering the news over their acceptance of free vacations and more from wealthy Republican donors, comes a new revelation that puts one justice — and his wife — in the crosshairs.

The Intercept reported this week that Martha Ann Bomgardner Alito, wife of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, leased land last year to an oil and gas company in Grady, Okla. The 160 acres, which Bomgardner Alito inherited, stands to be very lucrative. The agreement with Citizen Energy stipulates that the company will pay Bomgardner Alito 3/16ths of any profits it makes from oil and gas sales.

Citizen Energy is one of the largest producers of oil and gas in Oklahoma, which, as of 2022, was the sixth largest company outputting petroleum, a fossil fuel.

There are no known direct conflicts yet between the purchase and Justice Alito’s rulings, but it adds “context to a political outlook that has alarmed environmentalists since Alito’s confirmation hearing in 2006 — and cast recent decisions that embolden the oil and gas industry in a damning light,” according to The Intercept.

“There need not be a specific case involving the drilling rights associated with a specific plot of land for Alito to understand what outcomes in environmental cases would buttress his family’s net wealth,” said Jeff Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project, an independent executive branch watchdog.

Alito’s record on the environment is one of undoing gains. In 2022, he was one of the six justices who voted to curb the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions. Just the previous year, President Biden said the United States would work to cut planet-warming emissions nearly in half by 2030. This would involve a switch to electric vehicles as well as the shuttering of all coal-powered plants. Justice Alito also wrote the majority opinion on a case in May that gutted the Clean Water Act.

“Alito does not have to come across like a drunken Paul Thomas Anderson character gleefully confessing to drinking our collective milkshakes in order to be a real life, run-of-the-mill political villain,” Hauser said.

In 2017, the justice proved his grasp on the science of global warming dubious. “All of us are exhaling carbon dioxide right now,” he said at a keynote speech at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think-tank. “So, if it’s a pollutant, we’re all polluting.”

In his 2006 Senate confirmation hearing, Justice Alito said that justices should recuse themselves from cases where there might be “any possible question” about “the appearance of impropriety.” That, as of now, includes any future cases involving the fossil fuel industry — and the major rulings against the EPA in the past year, since his wife leased the land.