Linda Greenhouse has a long, tortuous essay criticizing Justice Alito. I’m going to assume all her facts are correct — although they were glaringly wrong the last time I looked at one of her essays (which, incidentally, does not carry a correction to this day) — because even if they are she doesn’t make her case.

Among other things, she accuses him of making “what I’ll call a straight play to the base.” Her main example concerns the Sixth Amendment, which in relevant part guarantees “the Assistance of Counsel” for criminal defendants. Alito wrote that in determining whether an attorney has provided what the Constitution requires these defendants to receive, the fact that the attorney followed the American Bar Association’s guidelines cannot be the end of the inquiry. He doesn’t put it explicitly in these terms, but presumably he’s raising the possibility that an attorney could meet the guidelines while falling short of the Sixth Amendment, or vice-versa. The ABA’s guidelines, that is, don’t have constitutional status. They don’t, as Alito put it, “have special relevance in determining whether an attorney’s performance meets the standard required by the Sixth Amendment.”

It seems to me that Alito is clearly correct on this point. Greenhouse does not at any point consider whether he is correct, or give any indication of thinking that it matters if he is correct. Instead she writes: “Despite having received its highest rating of ‘well qualified’ at the time of his Supreme Court nomination, Justice Alito is clearly bothered by the A.B.A. — bothered a lot.” The ingrate! (I think we all know what Greenhouse would have written if the ABA had given Alito a low rating and then written the same comments.) And: “[O]ne or more justices may think twice before offering a garland to the A.B.A. in the future and thus provoking another outburst.”

In another case, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that the Court should consider the American Psychological Association’s opinions about how to determine which defendants are so disabled that a death sentence would constitute “cruel and unusual punishment” and therefore be barred by the Eighth Amendment. Justice Alito again voted to rule that the constitutional inquiry could not be outsourced in this way, at least under the Court’s previous precedents. In his view, those precedents made the decisive question what the American people consider cruel and unusual. Greenhouse, again, does not say a word about the merits. Instead she says that Alito was again showing his “disdain for organizations of professionals.”

Greenhouse says she “can think of no other explanation” for Alito’s comments about the ABA than that he was making a “play” to his conservative base. I think that tells us nothing about Alito, and nothing about Greenhouse we didn’t already know.