Chris Geidner really nailed it in his recap for Slate of today’s oral argument in the Alexander case (South Carolina racial gerrymandering):

As Jackson explained, under the clear error standard, “A finding [from the district court] that is plausible in light of the full record, even if another is equally or more so, must govern.”

Ultimately, that won’t really matter if Alito has his way. Alito was driven on Wednesday, seeking to undermine—and change—how deferential the “clear error” standard is in gerrymandering cases. Pushing back on the questions that had been posed to Gore by several of his colleagues, especially the three Democratic appointees, Alito stopped to tell everyone that the clear error standard “is not an impossible standard” for South Carolina to meet.

“It doesn’t mean that we simply rubber-stamp findings by a district court, particularly in a case like this, where we are the only court that is going to be reviewing those findings,” he said, a reference to the fact that three-judge district court rulings are heard directly on appeal by the Supreme Court. Further still, Alito argued that it matters here that the decision below “relies very heavily, if not entirely, on expert reports.” From there, Alito segued into a question about a specific issue regarding the analysis of one of the plaintiffs’ experts and a question that South Carolina raised in its final brief at the Supreme Court about “an alleged flaw” in that expert’s analysis.

If Alito was worked up during Gore’s questioning, that was just a warm-up round for the respondents’ argument, when Alito effectively took over for Gore, posing no fewer than 37 questions to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund’s Leah Aden—including a marathon 19-question session taking up 11 pages of the transcript during his final chance to question her.