Jodie Kantor yesterday published another piece about how the Alito’s summer home was flying a second flag showing common cause with the stop the steal movement.
We now have two judges on the highest court on the land adjudicating on Trump’s immunity case, one of who’s wife was a intimately involved in the organization of the Jan6th protest and another who has brazenly flouted ethical standards to publicly show common cause with them.
It is difficult to see the current conduct of the Alito/Thomas wing of the court as simply being blind to how their actions would be seen and instead a brazen act of “WTF are you going to do about it?”
The Alito’s nonsensical explanation for their upside down US flag is shown to be a lie. Additional reporting is saying that Martha had also previously spat at one of the neighbors involved in the neighborhood disagreements they claim prompted them to fly the flag in retaliation.
It’s just so unseemly. Do your corruption quietly! Don’t fly flags and spit at the neighbors, and don’t court billionaires while plotting an insurrection. Is it too much to ask?
It can be seen as a typical spat between neighbours, but there are a couple of things that take it out of the ordinary; the flying of a flag which is a symbol of insurrection by the wife of a SC judge, who’s very job it is to protect the constitution, is deeply troubling. The fact that he didn’t immediately take it down makes him complicit. None of that should happen, and it’s unprecedented as far as I know, which makes it difficult to know what action should be taken, but he’s clearly not impartial in any case involving the insurrection. That much is clear.
This incident also indicative of the hugely polarised state of politics in the US and complete lack of a middle ground where compromise and consensus might be found.
Alito is in a league of his own. Check out his opinion in the South Carolina gerrymandering case the other week. He basically said that because the Republicans who redrew the maps didn’t explicitly mention they were doing it for racial reasons then we should accept they were acting in good faith. wtaf !
The right has perfected the weaponization of plausible deniability with their symbols. They consciously adopt ones that have other meanings not just because they know the press will be incapable of navigating the subjectivity over intent and meaning once an incident occurs, but because they get off on the frustration people feel at the absurd conversation about the whether the nazi who uses nazi symbology really had nazi like intentions when speaking about a “Unified Reich”.
The hawaiian shirts, the “ok” hand symbol. The point is to make clear to outsiders who they are and what they stand for, while being able to be amused at their ability to defend themselves when challenged when self identified “reasonable people” pretend to give them the benefit of the doubt.
That is what they have done with the flag. They love how bullshit their innocent explanation is. The explanation isnt supposed to believeable.
‘I have an obligation’: Alito won’t recuse from Trump-related cases despite insurrection flag display
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has drawn plenty of criticism from Democrats — as well as from MSNBC host Joe Scarborough and other right-wing Never Trump conservatives — in response to reports of two flags hanging outside his properties.
Both flags have been used by Donald Trump supporters to symbolize the “Stop the Steal” campaign and the former president’s false repeatedly debunked claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.
Many of those critics have been arguing that Alito, in light of those flags, should recuse himself from Trump-related, election-related cases — including Trump’s presidential immunity claim.
In a letter to Senators Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island), Alito wrote, “You claim that two incidents involving the flying of flags created an appearance of impropriety that requires my recusal…. The two incidents you cite do not meet the conditions for recusal.”
Alito added, “I have an obligation to site” on the case Trump v. United States.
More here on the furore surrounding both Alito and Thomas. The brilliant Jamie Raskin contends that there is indeed already a remedy for recalcitrant justices.
'First, Justice Kennedy found that the standard for recusal must be objective because it is impossible to rely on the affected judge’s introspection and subjective interpretations. The court’s objective standard requires recusal when the likelihood of bias on the part of the judge “is too high to be constitutionally tolerable,” citing an earlier case. “This objective risk of bias,” according to Justice Kennedy, “is reflected in the due process maxim that ‘no man can be a judge in his own case.’” A judge or justice can be convinced of his or her own impartiality but also completely missing what other people are seeing.
Second, the Williams majority endorsed the American Bar Association’s Model Code of Judicial Conduct as an appropriate articulation of the Madisonian standard that “no man can be a judge in his own cause.” Model Code Rule 2.11 on judicial disqualification says that a judge “shall disqualify himself or herself in any proceeding in which the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” This includes, illustratively, cases in which the judge “has a personal bias or prejudice concerning a party,” a married judge knows that “the judge’s spouse” is “a person who has more than a de minimis interest that could be substantially affected by the proceeding” or the judge “has made a public statement, other than in a court proceeding, judicial decision or opinion, that commits or appears to commit the judge to reach a particular result.” These model code illustrations ring a lot of bells at this moment.’
