The Alitos and the upside-down flag.
The NYT reports: At Justice Alito’s House, a ‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol on Display
After the 2020 presidential election, as some Trump supporters falsely claimed that President Biden had stolen the office, many of them displayed a startling symbol outside their homes, on their cars and in online posts: an upside-down American flag.
One of the homes flying an inverted flag during that time was the residence of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in Alexandria, Va., according to photographs and interviews with neighbors.
If one is unfamiliar with symbolism, the piece explains as follows.
Turning the American flag upside down is a symbol of emergency and distress, first used as a military S.O.S., historians said in interviews. In recent decades, it has increasingly been used as a political protest symbol — a controversial one, because the flag code and military tradition require the paramount symbol of the United States to be treated with respect.
The linked piece does a good job of further elaborating on the linkage of the upside-down flag at the Stop the Steal movement.
When confronted with this story, Justice Alito deflects.
“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice 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.”
Judicial experts said in interviews that the flag was a clear violation of ethics rules, which seek to avoid even the appearance of bias, and could sow doubt about Justice Alito’s impartiality in cases related to the election and the Capitol riot.
Let’s just stop there. Alito has to know that this is nonsense. I am just a dean at a regional university, but if my wife put a sign in the yard that was associated with, say, racist views in a way that Black students would think I was biased against them, I could not just blame it on my wife as if it had no bearing on me. If she had a beef with the upper administration of my institution and displayed messaging that could reasonably be associated with criticizing them in an inflammatory way, that would definitely redound to me. (And likewise, if I displayed something that could affect her professionally).
Being a Justice on the US Supreme Court is many quanta beyond my petty authority and Alito knows what job he has. To pretend like it has nothing to do with him is beyond nonsense.
Look, on the one hand, I am not at all suggesting that spouses must have identical views on things. But on the other, symbols displayed (even if “briefly”) on a shared home are the responsibility of those in the home, especially adult spouses.
The mere impression of political opinion can be a problem, the ethics experts said. “It might be his spouse or someone else living in his home, but he shouldn’t have it in his yard as his message to the world,” said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia.
This is “the equivalent of putting a ‘Stop the Steal’ sign in your yard, which is a problem if you’re deciding election-related cases,” she said.
Interviews show that the justice’s wife, Martha-Ann Alito, had been in a dispute with another family on the block over an anti-Trump sign on their lawn, but given the timing and the starkness of the symbol, neighbors interpreted the inverted flag as a political statement by the couple.
Look, it strains credulity that the selection of that symbol at the moment in time with an anti-Trump neighbor was anything other than a “stop the steal” message. That is a highly inflammatory, and utterly unacceptable message coming from the residence of a Supreme Court Justice.
It speaks to the self-degradation of the Court and to why trust in it is eroding. Moreover, it reasonably deepens concerns that there are highly placed members of the federal government who were, and presumably still are, sympathetic to the January 6th insurrection and to Trump’s attempt at overturning the election. We already know that Clarence Thomas’ wife, Ginni, holds such views. So, again, while it is possible that Martha-Ann Alito and Ginni on the one hand have insurrectionist views and Samuel and Thomas do not, I must confess as someone who will be married thirty-four years next month, I find it unlikely that the spouses in question are starkly divided.
