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      Rightwing US supreme court justices are in trouble. So they’ve discovered feminism | Judith Levine

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      At the start of her rallies, Phyllis Schlafly, the woman who defeated the equal rights amendment, always thanked her husband, Fred, for letting her out of the house.Ah, those were the days.Husbands have lost their control. And, it would seem, none more than the poor schlubs on the bench of the supreme court of the United States.Before January 6, Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, the far-right activist Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, plunged deep into the “Stop the Steal” movement, which attempted to frame Joe Biden’s fair and free election as rigged. She sent dozens of texts to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, egging him on to overturn the election. Later, she claimed Clarence had nothing to do with it.“Like so many married couples, we share many of the same ideals, principles, and aspirations for America,” Ginni Thomas told the Washington Free Beacon in early 2022. “But we have our own separate careers, and our own ideas and opinions too. Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work.”Nevertheless, questioned by the congressional January 6 committee as to whether she conferred with anyone about the texts, she allowed that she’d spoken to her “best friend” – Clarence. She couldn’t remember the “specifics”, she said. But “my husband often administers spousal support to the wife that’s upset.”Meadows filed an amicus brief in Trump’s appeal to withhold documents from the investigators; the texts, including Ginni Thomas’s, were included in the subpoenaed materials. Clarence Thomas was the sole dissenter in the supreme court’s rejection of Trump’s appeal.Jane Sullivan Roberts – Mrs Chief Justice John Roberts – earned over $10m recruiting conservative government lawyers to elite law firms precisely during the years of her husband’s tenure on the court. Although some of these firms appear before the court, the Robertses insist that her work is her own and poses no conflict of interest for him. Anyway, according to a former colleague of Jane’s, nothing exchanged was more consequential than the chitchat at any Washington cocktail party.“Friends of John were mostly friends of Jane,” the colleague told Insider. “And while it certainly did not harm her access to top people to have John as her spouse, I never saw her ‘use’ that inappropriately.”Just affectionate give-and-take, like the uber-luxurious gifts bestowed on the Thomases by the rightwing billionaires Clarence met after ascending to the supreme court.And now we learn that an inverted American flag – ensign of Maga insurrectionists, carried by many during the Capitol riot – flew in front of Justice Samuel Alito’s home in January 2021, three days before Joe Biden’s swearing-in as president.But Alito – who is about to sign the ruling on whether Trump is immune from prosecution for inciting the riot or, for that matter, anything else he ever does – says he never touched, or apparently looked at or commented on, the flag. His wife, Martha-Ann, ran her opinion up the flagpole during a neighborly tiff. “I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” the justice said in an email to the New York Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.” She is her own woman.This is the same Samuel Alito who opined in Planned Parenthood v Casey in 1991 that requiring the husband’s consent for an abortion did not impose an undue burden on the woman, and in fact, served a compelling state interest. Different strokes for different folks.And then there’s Amy Coney Barrett, who served as a “handmaiden” for the male-supremacist Christian sect People of Praise, advising wives on submitting to the “headship” of their husbands.So here’s the ideology of the court’s conservative majority: a husband should rule over his wife except when he declares her independence because the ideologies she clearly shares with him might cause him trouble.The women on the court are not indulging in this ploy. Why not? “He does what he wants” might be more credible. It’s not that they’re good because they’re women. Two of them have scant opportunity for family-related conflicts of interest. Sonia Sotomayor is divorced. Elena Kagan never married. Neither of them has children. Meanwhile, a conservative law firm has filed an ethics complaint against Ketanji Brown Jackson for not disclosing income from her husband’s medical malpractice consulting. If the contention is true, her omission is illegal, not to mention unethical. But it would be a stretch to call it political. And Brown hasn’t blamed her husband.Jennifer Weiner recently argued in the New York Times that “Blame my wife,” an excuse employed by Republicans and Democrats alike, might indicate “the faintest glimmer of progress” – feminist progress. “When a Supreme Court justice blames his wife, he is also acknowledging that his wife has the ability to act on her own ideas, has a mind confoundingly of her own,” Weiner wrote.Nah. The men who stripped half the US population of a 50-year-old right of bodily autonomy have not osmosed feminism despite themselves. Rather, they are exploiting feminism: impersonating pro-feminist men when it serves them and screwing women (and the less powerful in general) when it doesn’t. Mr Nice Guy; no more Mr Nice Guy. That’s patriarchal privilege.The male justices are also implicitly invoking a right that feminists, along with Black and LGBTQ+ civil rights activists, conceived and won: the right to relational privacy. By contending that their professional thoughts and actions are unaffected by their wives’, the justices communicate that no one else knows what goes on inside their marriages and no one has the prerogative to eavesdrop on their breakfast table conversations or evaluate the meanings and effects of what is said there.The sanctity of privacy in intimate behavior, including the rights of married couples to use contraception, of queer people to have sex and marry each other and of pregnant people to end their pregnancies, did not spring from the heads of supreme court justices. But supreme court justices can take them away. In fact, these are the rights, and the cases involving them, that Thomas, in his concurring opinion in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, urged the court to “reconsider” – presumably to overturn, as it overturned Roe. Thomas did not mention whether Loving v Virginia, the 1967 case securing the right to interracial marriage, like his own, should be reconsidered. Maybe he needs to talk it over with Ginni.In March 1776 the first lady, Abigail Adams, wrote to her husband, President John Adams, exercising her influence as a highly placed political wife. She implored him to “Remember the Ladies” when he and the other founding fathers were declaring independence and writing the laws that would follow.But that’s just the famous part of the letter. “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands,” Mrs Adams continued, playing on the language of freedom from colonial rule. “Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”American feminists have rekindled that Rebelion. Some chose to make noise in front of Alito’s home to express their rage at his majority opinion in Dobbs. They wanted “to bring the protest to [the Alitos’] personal lives because the decisions affect our personal lives”, said one demonstrator. The personal is political, as much for the men in black robes as it is for the rest of us.
      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept, and the author of five books More

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      Trump prosecutor Fani Willis wins Georgia primary election

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      Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney overseeing Georgia’s expansive criminal case against Donald Trump and his allies for attempting to overturn the 2020 election, has won her Democratic primary bid for re-election with nearly 90% of the vote.Willis and Judge Scott McAfee – who won his primary election on Tuesday – are central figures in the prosecution against the former president and associates in his orbit accused of conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election.Willis will now face Republican lawyer Courtney Kramer in November. With her high name recognition, the advantages of incumbency and a hefty fundraising haul, Willis’s victory in the primary was not terribly surprising.The most prominent – and sweeping – charge handed down in an indictment by a grand jury in August 2023 alleged Trump and 18 co-defendants violated Georgia’s racketeering law in a criminal conspiracy to unlawfully change the results of the election.Trump allies, including the attorneys Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, were also charged with forgery in connection with their efforts to send false pro-Trump electors to represent swing states that had in fact elected Joe Biden.Willis’s role in pursuing the most comprehensive prosecution against Trump has drawn her intense scrutiny. In March, the prosecutor who Willis hired to lead the case, Nathan Wade, resigned after revelations about a romantic relationship between him and Willis threatened to derail the prosecution.Last week, the Georgia court of appeals agreed to consider an appeal from Trump’s defense seeking to toss Willis from the case amid the allegations of unethical conduct.Amid the prosecution, Willis has also faced a barrage of threats and harassment. In May, a California resident was charged with threatening to injure Willis for her role in prosecuting Trump and his allies.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      US justice department sues Oklahoma in challenge to immigration law

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      The US Department of Justice sued Oklahoma on Tuesday over a state law that seeks to impose criminal penalties on those living in the state illegally.The lawsuit in federal court in Oklahoma City challenges an Oklahoma law that makes it a state crime – punishable by up to two years in prison – to live in the state without legal immigration status. Similar laws passed in Texas and Iowa are already facing challenges from the justice department. Oklahoma is among several GOP states jockeying to push deeper into immigration enforcement as both Republicans and Democrats seize on the issue. Other bills targeting undocumented immigrants have been passed this year in Florida, Georgia and Tennessee.The justice department says the Oklahoma law violates the US constitution and is asking the court to declare it invalid and bar the state from enforcing it.“Oklahoma cannot disregard the US Constitution and settled Supreme Court precedent,” Brian M Boynton, the US principal deputy assistant attorney general and head of the justice department’s civil division, said in a statement. “We have brought this action to ensure that Oklahoma adheres to the Constitution and the framework adopted by Congress for regulation of immigration.” The Oklahoma governor, Kevin Stitt, said the bill was necessary because the Biden administration was failing to secure the nation’s borders.“Not only that, but they stand in the way of states trying to protect their citizens,” Stitt said in a statement.The federal action was expected, as the Department of Justice warned Oklahoma officials last week that the agency would sue unless the state agreed not to enforce the new law.In response, the Oklahoma attorney general, Gentner Drummond, called the justice department’s pre-emption argument “dubious at best” and said that while the federal government had broad authority over immigration, it did not have “exclusive power” on the subject.“Oklahoma is exercising its concurrent and complementary power as a sovereign state to address an ongoing public crisis within its borders through appropriate legislation,” Drummond wrote in a letter to the justice department. “Put more bluntly, Oklahoma is cleaning up the Biden Administration’s mess through entirely legal means in its own backyard – and will resolutely continue to do so by supplementing federal prohibitions with robust state penalties.”Texas was allowed to enforce a law similar to Oklahoma’s for only a few confusing hours in March before it was put on hold by a federal appeals court’s three-judge panel. The panel heard arguments from both supporters and opponents in April, and will next issue a decision on the law’s constitutionality.The justice department filed another lawsuit earlier this month seeking to block an Iowa law that would allow criminal charges to be brought against people who have outstanding deportation orders or who previously have been removed from or denied admission to the US.The law in Oklahoma has prompted several large protests at the state capitol that included immigrants and their families voicing concern that their loved ones will be racially profiled by police.“We feel attacked,” said Sam Wargin Grimaldo, who attended a rally last month wearing a shirt that read “Young, Latino and Proud”.“People are afraid to step out of their houses if legislation like this is proposed and then passed,” he said. More

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      Lindsey Graham says Alito’s upside-down flag was ‘not good judgment’

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      Lindsey Graham has said it was “not good judgment” for the supreme court justice Samuel Alito to allow an upside-down American flag to be flown outside his home, marking what for him is a rare rebuke of a conservative judge.The Republican US senator’s comments on Monday to HuffPost’s Igor Bobic came after the New York Times’ recent report that an American flag was displayed upside down outside Alito’s home on 17 January 2021 – less than two weeks after supporters of Donald Trump carried out the deadly US Capitol attack and three days before Joe Biden’s inauguration.The inverted flag is a symbol which has been adopted by supporters of the former president’s false claims that Biden stole the presidency from him, and it reignited fears of political partisanship among the high court’s conservative supermajority, to which Alito belongs.Graham also alluded to claims from Alito that his wife, Martha-Ann, raised the flag in question after the couple became locked in a verbal dispute with a neighbor who used an expletive that is offensive to women. Nonetheless, the senior senator from South Carolina asserted: “It’s not good judgment to do that.“He said his wife was insulted and got mad – assume that to be true – but he’s still a supreme court justice,” Graham remarked. “And, you know, people have to realize that moments like that, to think it through.”As relatively restrained as Graham’s opinion was with respect to Alito, it was a notable shift from his usual supreme court rhetoric.In July 2023, after the supreme court had struck down federal abortion rights, Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan as well as a Colorado state law that compelled entities to afford same-sex couples equal treatment, Graham exalted the justices as “truly standing up for individual constitutional rights and limited government”.“I’ve never been prouder” of the US’s highest-ranking court of law, Graham said at the time. “Unfortunately, we should prepare for and get ready to witness accelerated attacks on the supreme court by radical liberal Democrats angry about these decisions.”The Times published its report about the upside-down flag at the Alitos’ as the supreme court weighs a decision on the extent of presidential immunity. That ruling is bound to affect at least one of Trump’s pending criminal cases heading into the Republican’s expected electoral rematch with his Democratic rival Biden in November.Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge, told the Times “it would be better for the court” if Alito were not involved in cases stemming from the 2020 election. But Fogel said he was “pretty certain that [Alito] will see that differently”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe supreme court has adopted a stronger yet non-binding code of ethics for the nine justices on the bench after another conservative member, Clarence Thomas, came under scrutiny for accepting non-disclosed trips funded by a Republican billionaire. Alito, too, reportedly had failed to disclose a similar trip to Alaska.Court employees are under strict rules prohibiting public displays of political affiliation, including bumper stickers on vehicles.According to Reuters, the US flag should be displayed upside down only “as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property”. More

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      Alito’s flag shows the US supreme court is neither honorable nor functional any more | Moira Donegan

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      These people can’t help themselves. Last week, the New York Times revealed that during the days after the violent attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021, when the US supreme court was still considering whether to take up cases challenging Joe Biden’s election victory, the home of the supreme court justice Samuel Alito, in suburban Virginia, flew a pro-coup flag. The Times printed photos of the American flag flying upside-down on a pole in Alito’s front yard; by January 2021, the upside-down flag had become a well-known symbol of the so-called “Stop the Steal” movement, champions of Donald Trump who supported his legal and violent attempts to overthrow the 2020 election.At the time, pro-Trump social media groups were encouraging supporters to fly their flags this way; upside-down flags had been carried by some of the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol, just a few days before the symbol appeared outside Alito’s house. In the election case that was then before the court, Alito voted to hear Republican challenges to the election results. But he didn’t get enough of his colleagues to vote his way. Not that time.The flying of the pro-Trump, pro-coup flag is in clear violation of the ethics rules that apply to federal judges. After several high-profile controversies at the court – including investigations into gifts given to Alito and his fellow conservative justice Clarence Thomas by deep-pocketed Republican donors – a controversy arose over why, precisely, those ethics rules have never extended to the supreme court justices.Under enormous political pressure, the court agreed to assign itself a version of those ethics rules last year, aiming, it said, to dispel any public concerns and recommit the court to maintaining an appearance of credible neutrality. (Such rules have long applied to court employees, who, the Times points out, are not permitted to so much as attend a protest or put a bumper sticker on their car.) The justices did not elect, however, to make the new ethics code in any way enforceable for themselves. They’re not rules that can be enforced; they’re guidelines that can be – and are – ignored.The court is currently considering several cases stemming from the January 6 insurrection, and will rule on two questions that concern its aftermath in the coming weeks: first, whether insurrectionists can be charged with obstruction of an official proceeding; and second, whether Donald Trump can be held legally responsible for crimes he committed while in office. After this November’s general election, there are almost certainly going to be further legal challenges to the election results, just as there were in 2020. Alito will be on the court to hear Trump’s arguments in those cases, too.The flag, then, is just the latest reminder of a disturbing reality: that as the Republican party further radicalizes against democracy, the supreme court – the body which is tasked with checking these unconstitutional impulses – has become their ally. The rule of law cannot be relied on to stem the tide of rising authoritarianism, because our legal institutions have been captured by the authoritarians.Why would Alito make such a brazen display of his partisan loyalties and disregard for the legitimate results of an election at a moment when the court is under such intense scrutiny? When the Times asked him about the pro-insurrection flag, Alito blamed his wife: he said she put it up after getting in a fight with a neighbor who had an anti-Trump lawn sign. It’s not clear exactly how this story is supposed to exonerate him: it doesn’t explain why the Alitos used this pro-coup gesture, of all the possible options, as a way to retaliate against their progressive neighbors. And the story is still one in which the Alitos are affirmatively voicing their partisan loyalty in public, and showing themselves unable to tolerate even the proximate presence of Americans who do not share their own morbid, conspiratorial and punitive worldview.But asking why Alito feels he can get away with it misses the point: he knows he can get away with it. The justice is perfectly aware that he does not need to pretend to neutrality, or hide his partisan loyalties, or behave, with anything like a convincing effort, like his work on the court is motivated by the law and not his own reactionary political preferences. Alito knows that he does not need to maintain any pretext of integrity, intellectual commitment or seriousness in his work. The supreme court has accumulated enough power to itself – and the justices have done a sufficiently good job of insulating themselves from any accountability or consequence – that he doesn’t even think he needs to lie any more. He’s comfortable being a partisan operative right out in the open.And why shouldn’t he? He’s not even the worst offender. After all, Clarence Thomas has not recused himself from insurrection-related cases, either, even though his wife, Ginni, was a vocal supporter of the insurrection – texting Trump’s then White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, over and over about the effort before, during and after the riot, and attended the “Save America” rally on January 6 herself. Like Alito, there is no way to force him to step aside.The justices do not enforce rules of impartiality, integrity, honesty, disclosure or decorum on themselves. And there are few mechanisms – and absolutely no political will – for anyone else to impose these on them. The people have no check on the court; Congress is dysfunctional and can’t act. And so the justices are acting like spoiled children: petulant, self-indulgent, shameless, jeering and unsupervised. Men like Alito and Thomas have not done what decency requires – and there are no means to compel them to.If this was an honorable court, a man like Alito would never have been appointed. If it was a functional court, he would resign. If it was a court composed of jurists capable of shame, he would recuse himself from election-related cases. But it is none of these things.It is time to admit what this court has become: an elite, but no less sadistic and vulgar, bastion of the anti-pluralist, anti-democratic forces that have captured so much of the Republican party and the conservative base. To say that the court is composed of partisan operatives – and that at least two of them are either so delusional that they have lost touch with reality or so cynical that they don’t mind when the facts diverge from their preferred outcomes – is so obvious as to be almost banal to any honest court observer. That anyone pretends that the court is a legitimate judicial body is a farce. That its actions still carry the force of law is a tragedy.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      The Year of Living Constitutionally: a man, a political plan … and a musket

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      Would you fly the Jolly Roger for Uncle Sam? AJ Jacobs tried to. For 12 months, the author and journalist became what he calls “the original originalist”, seeking to live the way the founders envisioned life under the US constitution.That life included the right to piracy on behalf of the US government. It sprang from a tradition predating the constitution, when the Continental Congress granted letters of marque and reprisal, allowing seamen to capture British ships. Noting this precedent, Jacobs brought an unconventional offer to Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman from California, when the two met in a hotel lobby.“I said, ‘I’m following the constitution and would like to be granted a letter of marque and reprisal,’” Jacobs recalls. “He said, ‘Great, let’s make it happen.’ I explained to him what it was: basically legalized piracy. I would fight our enemies on my friend’s water-ski boat.”After that, Khanna “was a little more like, ‘Maybe this is not going to happen.’”Jacobs didn’t get his Captain Jack Sparrow moment. But he did get a book out of the experience, The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution’s Original Meaning, which has received multiple votes of approval – including from Khanna.“He did like the idea of the book: trying to explain the origins of the constitution, what it really means, what it says.”In 2007, Jacobs published the results of a similar project, The Year of Living Biblically.“They have a similar status in our society,” he says, of the Bible and the constitution. “Some people see them as sacred and try to follow them in the original meaning as it was written.”Others look to adapt the texts for a modern era. For the constitution, this has evolved into a debate between originalists and living constitutionalists. Jacobs interviewed scholars across the spectrum.View image in fullscreen“This was my favorite part. They were super-generous with me.” Some were “people who were the most liberal and progressive and saw the constitution as having no intrinsic meaning, it could be molded like Play-Doh”. Others felt that “whatever the constitution meant then is what it means now. One guy refused to capitalize the S in ‘supreme court’. In the constitution” – as in the Guardian style guide – “the S is not capitalized … It was a wide range.”The originalists have been getting the better of things lately, including on the supreme court. And it was originalism – and the Guardian – that helped nudge Jacobs toward his book idea.After the 2022 supreme court decision Dobbs v Jackson, which overturned Roe v Wade, removing the federal right to abortion, a Guardian editor asked Jacobs to cover an unexpected trend. It related not to abortion, which was suddenly up to the states, but to vasectomies, which a surprising number of American men were choosing to have.“I am the type of journalist who tries things out myself and writes about the effort,” Jacobs says. “I did not feel like getting a vasectomy. I did not know if I was the right person for that interesting storyline.”What he did feel like was exploring the originalist mindset. He came across a startling statistic: at least 60% of Americans, including himself at the time, had not read the constitution from beginning to end, despite it running just four to six pages. It was time to delve into “what it really says, what it really means, instead of getting it filtered from whatever media you happen to be partial to. Let’s read what it actually says.”When it came to the right to piracy, although Jacobs couldn’t sail the high seas he did receive an email from a Khanna staffer addressing him as “Captain Jacobs”. Then there was petitioning the government. Instead of the online approach, Jacobs brought a scroll somewhere near 200ft long into the office of Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator from Oregon. Hundreds had signed the scroll. When Jacobs took some notes using his quill pen, it left ink on Wyden’s carpet. Jacobs added $50 to his taxes to foot the bill. (The subject of his petition was “Let’s have co-presidents”, a cause advocated by some founders, with Benjamin Franklin recommending 12 chief executives at once.)State laws came into the picture too. Free-speech advocates might be surprised by how much states policed what Americans said in the early republic. New York fined those who blasphemed or cursed 37 and a half cents. Jacobs did the same with his three sons, though they declined to come up with a half-cent.“It was not an easy year,” he says. “It was about as hard as The Year of Living Biblically.” That said, there were some differences. With the Bible, Jacobs “grew a huge beard. This did not involve as much facial hair.” But his appearance and lifestyle changed in other ways. He wore a tricorn hat, carried a musket, consumed an unusual amount of cloves, wrote with a quill, and woke up at the hour recommended by Franklin: 5am.View image in fullscreen“I tried to express second amendment rights the old-fashioned way,” he says. “I got a musket off ye olde internet and carried it around the Upper West Side where I live. A lot of people were crossing the street. People gave me a scowl.” When he brought it into a coffeeshop, a customer invited Jacobs to go ahead of him in line.“It’s sort of a good example of how this year went. At times, it was very strange, bizarre and awkward. But it was also, at the same time, incredibly enlightening and fascinating. I do think it gave real insight into how we should interpret the constitution.”He was particularly pleased with one custom: election cakes, meant to spur civic participation. Jacobs got volunteers representing all 50 states to bake election cakes last year. He plans to do it again.Although Jacobs appreciated the chance to adopt an 18th-century detachment from the near-constant news of today, he appreciates the progress America has made, saying: “It was terribly sexist and racist towards women, Black people and Indigenous people. I don’t want to go back to that.“Women’s rights were very constrained, especially married women, who were treated like children. They could not sign contracts. My wife owns a business. She signs several contracts a day.”Jacobs’s wife, Julie, let him take over contract-signing – then fired him after an hour.Jacobs also examined how 19th-century abolitionists saw the constitution. William Lloyd Garrison was so outraged by its stance on slavery that he advocated burning it – and did so. Frederick Douglass, who was formerly enslaved, had the same view but changed his mind and recommended Americans view the constitution as a promissory note.“Douglass says, ‘Let’s work to make America live up to the principles in the constitution.’ It becomes a very powerful way of looking at the constitution. Martin Luther King Jr talks about the constitution as a promissory note. Barack Obama gave a great speech that said the seeds of freedom were planted in the constitution … The solutions to the problems of the constitution are in the constitution itself.”
      The Year of Living Constitutionally is published in the US by Crown More

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      Trump trial judge rebuked for donations to Democrat-aligned groups in 2020

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      The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s hush-money campaign finance trial in New York has been cautioned by a state ethics panel over two small donations made to Democrat-aligned groups in 2020.The caution is likely to be seized on by Trump and his lawyers as evidence of his claims that the New York trial, now entering its fourth week, has been unfairly adjudicated by Judge Juan Merchan along partisan political lines.But the New York state commission on judicial conduct has not revealed who lodged the complaint against Merchan that stems from a $35 donation to the Democratic group ActBlue that included $15 earmarked for Biden for President and $10 each to Progressive Turnout Project and Stop Republicans.“Justice Merchan said the complaint, from more than a year ago, was dismissed in July with a caution,” spokesperson Al Baker of the state office of court administration said in response to an inquiry from Reuters.The commission considers that contributions violate the rules on prohibited political activity. In its 2024 annual report, the body said several dozen judges had apparently made prohibited contributions in the last few years, mostly to candidates for federal office.Judges are prohibited from contributing to any campaigns, including for federal office.“Like so much of the misconduct the commission encounters, making a prohibited political contribution is a self-inflicted mistake,” the commission wrote in the report.The commission has also received a complaint against the Manhattan judge Arthur Engoron, who oversaw the former president’s civil business fraud trial that resulted in a $454m fine earlier this year. That complaint, brought by Trump lawyers, has yet to be adjudicated.Under commission guidelines, proceedings are confidential unless there is a public censure or the judge makes them public.Trump has been highly critical of the justices in both cases. In the earlier trial he was censured for describing Judge Engoron’s law clerk of being Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer’s girlfriend. In the current case, he has drawn attention to Judge Merchan’s daughter, who works as a Democratic political consultant.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn response to a motion for Merchan to step aside, which the judge denied, a separate advisory committee on judicial ethics said the contributions did not create an impression of bias or favoritism.Reports of the contributions come a day after the New York Times revealed that the wife of conservative supreme court justice Samuel Alito had flown an inverted American flag outside the couple’s home in the aftermath of the 2020 election.Alito has said that his wife took that action because a Democratic neighbor had used a highly pejorative insult to describe her to her face. More

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      Red flag? Samuel Alito scandal casts further doubt on supreme court’s impartiality

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      With less than six months to go before America chooses its next president, the US supreme court finds itself in a profoundly unenviable position: not only has it been drawn into the thick of a volatile election, but swirling ethical scandals have cast doubt on its impartiality.The US supreme court’s discomfort worsened dramatically on Thursday night when the New York Times published a photograph of an upside-down American flag being flown outside the Alexandria, Virginia, home of the hard-right justice Samuel Alito. The photo was taken on 17 January 2021, days after the insurrection at the US Capitol and days before Joe Biden’s inauguration.At the time, upside-down flags were proliferating as a symbol of Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him. That one of the nine most powerful justices in the country – who has potential to wield enormous influence over the 2024 election – had a “stop the steal” icon flapping on his front lawn was, to put it mildly, incendiary.“There’s little doubt that the supreme court will play a large role in the 2024 election, and you have to now ask whether the flag incident will forever cloud the public’s view of its impartiality in those cases,” said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, a non-partisan group advocating reform.The supreme court memorably handed the US presidency to George W Bush in its 2000 ruling Bush v Gore. Though no individual case so far this year has risen to that level, there is no doubt that the justices are deeply mired in the 2024 cycle.They have already decided that Trump cannot be ejected from the ballot for his role in the January 6 attack under the 14th amendment block on insurrectionists holding office. By the end of their term in June they are also set to rule on two other critical cases that go to the heart of Trump’s fitness to govern, and hence the presidential outcome.The first asks whether Trump has presidential immunity in the federal criminal prosecution over his “stop the steal” antics in 2020/21. The other, which could also determine whether he can be tried for his attempt to overturn the election, looks at whether January 6 rioters can be charged under the obstruction statute.All of that before we even get to the election itself, and the possibility of renewed trouble in November should there be close and contested counts in key battleground states. As one of the justices expressly warned in the 14th amendment case, further insurrections were not impossible.View image in fullscreen“I don’t know how much we can infer from the fact that we haven’t seen anything like this before [that] we’re not going to see something in the future,” the justice said. His identity? Samuel Alito.Until last Thursday, there had been plenty of talk about whether the supreme court was ethically equipped to tackle fundamental questions that could drastically change the course of November’s election. But most of it concerned Clarence Thomas.His wife, Ginni, is a hard-right activist who was an active participant in efforts to stop the certification of Biden’s victory. Yet Thomas has consistently refused to recuse himself from supreme court cases relating to January 6, even ones which directly invoked Ginni.After Thursday, we now have not one but two of the conservative justices whose spouses have engaged in apparent pro-Trump political activity. In his self-defense, Alito told the New York Times: “I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” putting it all down to a spat his wife, Martha-Ann, was having with neighbors who had defaced a Trump lawn sign.Some law scholars were prepared to give Alito the benefit of the doubt. Stephen Gillers, emeritus professor at New York University law school, said that he did not believe Alito knew the upside-down flag was flying, or that it was a coded message for “stop the steal”.“While Alito’s explanation for how it did happen is hard to believe, it is more credible than the view that he knowingly chose to fly the flag upside down knowing its import.”But there is no doubt that the optics of the flag are atrocious. As Gillers also noted: “It’s obviously so damaging to the court, whose reputation is already suffering.”The highest court has taken such a battering over its ethical standards – mostly relating to private jets, vacations and other material benefits rather than political activities – that it has been forced to adopt its first-ever ethical code. It says that a justice must recuse him or herself from a case where they have a “personal bias or prejudice”.That might involve their spouse being party to the proceeding or having an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding, the code states.Given what we now know about the behavior and convictions of both Ginni and Martha-Ann, it is arguable that there is at least a conversation to be had about whether Justices Thomas and Alito should disqualify themselves from any case relating to January 6. But there’s the rub.Under the new code, the supreme court polices itself on all ethical matters. Not only that – each individual justice polices him or herself, in effect sitting in judgment on themselves with even their eight colleagues having no say.Unsurprisingly, in the six months that the new code has been in existence very few justices have recused themselves. Where they have, only the liberal justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson have publicly explained their decisions.It all points towards more storms ahead. It is now all but inevitable there will be calls for both Alito and Thomas to recuse themselves as election year proceeds.“The fact that two justices live in households with people who believe the 2020 election was stolen is astounding and disturbing,” Roth said. “Will they heed the calls for recusal? Probably not. Is there any way to force them? No.” More