On Easter Sunday 2020, Andy Beshear sent Kentucky State Police to record the license plates of Christians attending drive-in church services.
Justice Samuel Alito never forgot what happened – and just said so on national television.
And then Alito released the grades.
When COVID Lockdowns Treated Church as a Second-Class Right
A small Nevada church called Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley wanted to host 90 worshippers – about half its legal capacity – with social distancing, masks, and every safety precaution the state required during the pandemic.
Former Nevada Democrat Governor Steve Sisolak said no.
Fifty people maximum, no matter how large the building, no matter what safety measures the congregation followed.
Meanwhile, Caesars Palace could operate at half its fire-code capacity.
Calvary Chapel sued, and the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to let Sisolak's order stand – Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the liberal bloc.
Justice Alito dissented, and the line he put in writing still holds.
"There is no world in which the Constitution permits Nevada to favor Caesars Palace over Calvary Chapel."
Donald Trump later called Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas "legends" for their stand – and he was right.
Promoting his new book So Ordered: An Originalist's View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country, releasing October 6, Alito appeared on Fox News Sunday with Shannon Bream and brought it all back without apologizing for a word of it.
"I think it was a stress test of our constitutional rights," he told Bream.
"It put our loyalty to those constitutional rights, our dedication to those constitutional rights, to the test."
The COVID Restrictions That Blatantly Discriminated Against Houses of Worship
Alito first named what was happening in November 2020, when he addressed the Federalist Society's National Lawyers Convention and called COVID restrictions "previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty."
"The COVID crisis has served as a sort of constitutional stress test," he said then.
The left called him partisan. He looked at the evidence and told the truth.
In Nevada, unelected officials decided casinos were economically essential and churches were an obstacle. Courts – including the Supreme Court majority – deferred to those officials as though emergency declarations had no constitutional limit.
This time, he went further.
"One of the things that, unfortunately, it disclosed was that many people were willing to downgrade certain constitutional rights: the right to freedom of speech and the right to the free exercise of religion," he said.
"In particular, they were willing to make those secondary to other things."
Secondary to what?
Secondary to a governor who – by his own account – "spent countless hours praying" about his lockdown decisions while simultaneously deciding that the God he was praying to had no special claim on the buildings where His people gathered.
Sisolak told the court that casinos were acceptable because they operated under heavy regulatory oversight with rapid-shutdown capability.
Calvary Chapel proposed socially distanced seating, masks, and a voluntary safety plan – and the state said that wasn't enough, even as casino patrons crowded around card tables, many without masks.
The craps tables were fine.
Nevada wasn't the only state running this play. Alito recalled that in New York City's red zone, a church seating more than 1,000 people and a synagogue seating roughly 400 were both capped at 50 worshippers, while the big box stores a short distance away stayed open and ran as normal.
Sisolak wasn't an outlier – he was the template.
COVID Church Lockdowns Were Political, Not Scientific
Alito was right in 2020 and nobody who attacked him has ever apologized.
The COVID lockdowns targeting religious gatherings weren't about science or public health – they were political. Nevada's gaming industry has one of the most powerful lobbies in America. The church had a congregation and a Constitution, and the governor chose the lobby.
Alito is still making that case – in a book, in a Fox News Sunday chair – because it has not been answered.
The Constitution does not pause when someone declares an emergency. The Bill of Rights is not a luxury item suspended whenever public health officials decide they know better than the First Amendment.
No emergency order gives a state the right to wave gamblers through Caesars Palace while telling Christians they cannot fill their own sanctuary.
Every American who drove past a locked church in 2020 and saw a casino lit up and running already understood that.
Alito just put it in writing.
Sources:
- Libby Bandelin, "Justice Alito Says COVID-19 Put Americans' Constitutional Rights To Test … And Many Failed," Daily Caller, October 4, 2026.
- Staff, "Alito Defends Justices Against a 'Concerted Effort to Intimidate the Court,'" Washington Sun, October 4, 2026.
- Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley v. Steve Sisolak, Supreme Court of the United States, 2020.
- Justice Samuel Alito, Address to Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention, November 12, 2020.
- Tim Hains, "Justice Alito: COVID Was A Stress Test Of Our Commitment To Constitutional Rights," RealClearPolitics, October 4, 2026.
