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Alito pro-Trump upside down flag another blow to Supreme Court judicial and political credibility

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Last August the Supreme Court’s approval rating dipped to a new low. Last month the Court’s approval rating improved considerably. Expect it to go way down again. Half (or more) will now see the once-venerable court as a group with at least two members not only with their thumbs overtly on the scale, but virtually sitting on one side of the scale.

The latest scandal to hit the court: The New York Times reported that right after the January 6 coup attempt Alito had an upside down flag on display at his home. Alito blamed it on his wife putting it upside down to answer a neighbor’s F*** Trump sign. This was a non-answer: no matter what the provocation, a flag was flying at Alito’s home clearly communicating a position since the upside down flag was used for the “Stop the Steal” post-2020 election movement. It had come to symbolize The Big Lie. Election denying.
CNN:

An upside-down American flag – a symbol used by some supporters of former President Donald Trump who challenged the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory – hung outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito after the election, The New York Times reported Thursday.

The revelation is almost certain to prompt calls for Alito, a member of the court’s conservative wing, to recuse himself from several high-profile cases pending before the court this year involving the election and subsequent attack on the US Capitol, including the blockbuster question of whether Trump may claim immunity from federal election subversion charges.

The Times published a photo of the inverted flag, which it said was seen at the justice’s home in Alexandria, Virginia, on January 17, 2021.

A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNN, which has not independently verified the flag’s use.

“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Alito said in an emailed statement to the Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

The upside-down flag became a symbol of the “Stop the Steal” movement in the weeks and months following the election, in which Trump’s supporters falsely claimed that Biden’s win was illegitimate due to widespread fraud. The inverted flag was widely seen during the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

The Times said it was not clear how long the flag flew outside of Alito’s home.

The story will heap further scrutiny on the high court at a time when it is already facing considerable blowback. Justice Clarence Thomas has been the subject of significant criticism and calls for recusal in election-related cases after his wife, conservative activist Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, acknowledged she attended Trump’s rally before the Capitol attack and supported White House efforts to discredit the election results.

Thomas recently accused his critics of “nastiness” and “lies” in remarks to a judicial conference in Alabama.

Esquire’s Charles Pierce writes:

Right now, the Court is deliberating the concept of sweeping presidential immunity, a legal absurdity concocted by the former president* and his lawyers in an attempt to sabotage once and for all special counsel Jack Smith’s case against him concerning his actions on January 6, 2021. The entire Republican party is engaged in a massive act of historical vandalism concerning the events of that day, and the guy in the special counsel’s crosshairs is the presumptive GOP presidential nominee. And the angriest, most arrogant member of the carefully cultivated conservative majority had the ultimate symbol of wing-nut vengeance flying above his house. That is not the flag that the Constitution follows.

Salon’s Amanda Marcotte:

Gross and undeniable in its meaning, of course. But Alito, who has never been interested in honesty with the public, offered a glib rebuttal, telling the New York Times, “I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag.” Instead, he blamed his wife, saying she flew the inverted flag as a “response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

As Joe Scarborough on MSNBC retorted Friday morning, “nobody believes him.” There’s no universe, Scarborough noted, in which the upside-down flag is used as a way to throw the finger to neighbors you’re in a spat with. This is Alito lying by omission. As Kantor swiftly discovered, the argument the Alitos were having with their neighbors wasn’t over loud parties or defecating dogs, it was over Jan. 6, which the neighbors in question vociferously objected to. Martha-Ann Alito took offense to a neighbor who “displayed an anti-Trump sign with an expletive” around the election. Things escalated, and, as neighbors and documentary evidence show, the inverted flag was up in the days after the riot.

A more honest description of the conflict would be that the Alitos rejected their neighbor’s right to express their political opinions freely. In order to convey their disapproval of this use of First Amendment rights, the Alito household sent a message of support to people who used violence in an attempt to destroy American democracy. As more than one commentator pointed out, Alito continues to run around pretending he’s a champion of “free speech,” but when his neighbors expressed an opinion held by most Americans, he (or his wife, if you believe him) responded with an endorsement of violence to end constitutional democracy as we know it.

When asked about this by Shannon Bream of Fox News on Friday, Alito doubled down on the faux outrage over curse words and claimed his wife only expressed support for the Jan. 6 rioters after neighbors said mean things to the couple about how violent insurrections are, in fact, bad.

There have been calls for Thomas to recuse himself on cases related to the 2020 Presidential election and its aftermath. Thomas has ignored them. There are now calls for Alito to recuse himself.

And guess what he will (or won’t) do…

As Daffy Duck might say: “Credibility, shmedibility, what does it matter if you have power?”