Good morning, US politics blog readers. The New York Times reported yesterday that a flag used by supporters of Donald Trump’s baseless claim of fraud in his 2020 election loss flew outside Samuel Alito’s house shortly before Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021. The supreme court justice, who said the flag was displayed by his wife amid a dispute with a neighbor, is a conservative stalwart on the court, and authored the decision that two years ago overturned Roe v Wade and allowed states the ban abortion. The reactions to the news have been predictably partisan, with Republican senator Tom Cotton accusing the Times of trying to “incite another mob”, Minnesota’s Democratic governor Tim Walz describing flying the flag as “not normal” and Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal saying the court’s credibility “is plummeting”.The story was the latest in a string of reports that have emerged over the past year and raised questions about the supreme court’s ethics. While these stories have generated plenty of outrage, none of the justices involved have suffered any consequences, and the conservatives remain dominant on the court, with six seats against the liberals’ three. The court is poised to soon rule on whether Donald Trump is immune from prosecution over his attempt to overturn the 2020 election – a case that could have a major impact on his rematch with Joe Biden.Here’s what else is going on today:
The House oversight committee late yesterday advanced a resolution to hold attorney general Merrick Garland in contempt for not releasing a recording of Biden’s interview with a special counsel, but only after a shouting match between lawmakers.
Biden, who polls show has lost some of his support with Black voters, will speak at the National Museum of African American History and Culture at 11.45am ET, and then meet with leaders of Black fraternities and sororities together with Kamala Harris at 3.30pm.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre takes reporters’ questions at 1pm.
The Democratic chair of the Senate judiciary committee, Dick Durbin, is calling on Samuel Alito to recuse himself from cases concerning Donald Trump and the 2020 election after the New York Times reported that a flag supporting the ex-president’s false election fraud claims flew outside the supreme court justice’s residence.Here’s what Durbin had to say:
Flying an upside-down American flag – a symbol of the so-called ‘Stop the Steal’ movement – clearly creates the appearance of bias. Justice Alito should recuse himself immediately from cases related to the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection, including the question of the former President’s immunity in US v Donald Trump, which the supreme court is currently considering.
The court is in an ethical crisis of its own making, and Justice Alito and the rest of the court should be doing everything in their power to regain public trust. This latest story is further proof that Congress needs to pass the SCERT Act to create an enforceable code of conduct for the supreme court. Supreme court justices should be held to the highest ethical standards, not the lowest.
The Scert Act would require the supreme court to adopt a code of conduct and create a mechanism to investigate violations. While the court adopted an ethics code last year, it lacks any mechanism for enforcement.Republicans are vehemently against any new regulations on the supreme court, and have the votes to prevent the Scert Act from passing the Senate.In other news, the House oversight committee last night advanced a resolution to hold the attorney general, Merrick Garland, in contempt after he refused to release audio of Joe Biden’s interview with Robert Hur, the special counsel who investigated his possession of classified documents. But the vote only took place after a messy verbal clash between lawmakers at opposite ends of the political spectrum, the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports:The two most famous sets of initials in US politics clashed in a chaotic House hearing on Thursday, as the progressive star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or AOC, objected fiercely to an attack on another Democrat by the far-right Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, or MTG.The oversight committee hearing concerned Republican attempts to hold the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, in contempt, for refusing to release tapes of interviews between Joe Biden and the special counsel Robert Hur.Things went wrong when MTG made a partisan point, trying to tie Democrats to the judge in Donald Trump’s criminal hush-money case – which, by drawing a number of Republicans to the New York courtroom to support Trump, was responsible for the hearing starting late in the day.In answer to MTG, Jasmine Crockett of Texas said: “Please tell me what that has to do with Merrick Garland … Do you know what we’re here for? You know we’re here about AG Garland?”In response to the New York Times’s reporting, Samuel Alito acknowledged that the flag was raised outside his house, but said it was due to a dispute with a neighbor:
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.”
The Alitos live in Alexandria, Virginia, a pleasant city across the Potomac river from Washington DC, where some of their neighbors do not like them, the Times reports:
In recent years, the quiet sanctuary of his street, with residents who are Republicans and Democrats, has tensed with conflict, neighbors said. Around the 2020 election, a family on the block displayed an anti-Trump sign with an expletive. It apparently offended Mrs. Alito and led to an escalating clash between her and the family, according to interviews.
Some residents have also bridled at the noise and intrusion brought by protesters, who started showing up outside the Alito residence in 2022 after the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion. Other neighbors have joined the demonstrators, whose intent was “to bring the protest to their personal lives because the decisions affect our personal lives,” said Heather-Ann Irons, who came to the street to protest.
The half-dozen neighbors who saw the flag, or knew of it, requested anonymity because they said they did not want to add to the contentiousness on the block and feared reprisal. Last Saturday, May 11, protesters returned to the street, waving flags of their own (“Don’t Tread on My Uterus”) and using a megaphone to broadcast expletives at Justice Alito, who was in Ohio giving a commencement address. Mrs. Alito appeared in a window, complaining to the Supreme Court security detail outside.
As you can see in the below tweet from the New York Times, the flag flown outside the conservative supreme court justice Samuel Alito’s house was simply an upside-down American flag:But as their story notes, flying the flag that way had, by early 2021, become a symbol of support for Donald Trump’s false claims that his loss in the November 2020 election had occurred due to fraud:
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.
Over the years, upside-down flags have been displayed by both the right and the left as an outcry over a range of issues, including the Vietnam War, gun violence, the Supreme Court’s overturning of the constitutional right to abortion and, in particular, election results. In 2012, Tea Party followers inverted flags at their homes to signal disgust at the re-election of President Barack Obama. Four years later, some liberals advised doing the same after Mr. Trump was elected.
During Mr. Trump’s quest to win, and then subvert, the 2020 election, the gesture took off as never before, becoming “really established as a symbol of the ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign,” according to Alex Newhouse, a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder.
A flood of social media posts exhorted Trump supporters to flip over their flags or purchase new ones to display upside down.
“If Jan. 6 rolls around and Biden is confirmed by the Electoral College our nation is in distress!!” a poster wrote on Patriots.win, a forum for Trump supporters, garnering over a thousand “up” votes. “If you cannot go to the DC rally then you must do your duty and show your support for our president by flying the flag upside down!!!!”
In an appearance on MSNBC this morning, Richard Blumenthal, a Democratic senator who serves on the judiciary committee, said the revelation that a pro-Trump flag flew outside Samuel Alito’s house further undermines the supreme court’s credibility.Polls indicate public approval of the supreme court has declined over the past two decades, which Blumenthal blames on the conflicts of interest that have developed among its conservative justices. He called on Chief Justice John Roberts to order Alito and Clarence Thomas, a fellow conservative whose wife was involved in efforts to stop Joe Biden from taking office, to recuse themselves:Blumenthal has been among the Democratic lawmakers that have pressured Roberts and the justices to tighten their ethics following reports of their connections with wealthy conservatives:The revelation that a flag used by supporters of Donald Trump’s baseless 2020 election fraud claims flew outside the house of Samuel Alito comes as the court is considering whether to give the ex-president immunity from the federal charges brought against him for his attempt to block Joe Biden from assuming office.In oral arguments in the case last month, the supreme court justice and other conservatives seemed partial to Trump’s claim that he should be immune from at least some of the charges, since they concern his conduct while acting in his official capacity as president. That raises the prospect of a decision that could have the net effect of further delaying his trial, potentially until after his November presidential election rematch against Biden.During the oral arguments, Alito, together with fellow conservative Brett Kavanaugh, seemed worried that future presidents could be affected by a denial of immunity to Trump. Here’s a recap of their viewpoint, from the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell:
Alito and Kavanaugh suggested they were particularly concerned about zealous prosecutors going after former presidents once they left office for “mistakes” if the supreme court decided that presidents had no immunity from criminal prosecution.
“It’s not going to stop, it’s going to cycle back and be used against the current president and the next president and the next president after that,” Kavanaugh said.
The government disputed that prosecutors could wantonly target former presidents, arguing there were checks and balances in the judicial system like the grand jury process.
Alito was dismissive of the grand jury suggestion, bringing up the adage that a grand jury could indict a “ham sandwich”. When Dreeben said prosecutors don’t charge people who don’t deserve it, Alito responded: “Every once in a while there’s an eclipse too.”
For more on the case, and how the supreme court’s decision could affect it, here’s our story from April:Good morning, US politics blog readers. The New York Times reported yesterday that a flag used by supporters of Donald Trump’s baseless claim of fraud in his 2020 election loss flew outside Samuel Alito’s house shortly before Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021. The supreme court justice, who said the flag was displayed by his wife amid a dispute with a neighbor, is a conservative stalwart on the court, and authored the decision that two years ago overturned Roe v Wade and allowed states the ban abortion. The reactions to the news have been predictably partisan, with Republican senator Tom Cotton accusing the Times of trying to “incite another mob”, Minnesota’s Democratic governor Tim Walz describing flying the flag as “not normal” and Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal saying the court’s credibility “is plummeting”.The story was the latest in a string of reports that have emerged over the past year and raised questions about the supreme court’s ethics. While these stories have generated plenty of outrage, none of the justices involved have suffered any consequences, and the conservatives remain dominant on the court, with six seats against the liberals’ three. The court is poised to soon rule on whether Donald Trump is immune from prosecution over his attempt to overturn the 2020 election – a case that could have a major impact on his rematch with Joe Biden.Here’s what else is going on today:
The House oversight committee late yesterday advanced a resolution to hold attorney general Merrick Garland in contempt for not releasing a recording of Biden’s interview with a special counsel, but only after a shouting match between lawmakers.
Biden, who polls show has lost some of his support with Black voters, will speak at the National Museum of African American History and Culture at 11.45am ET, and then meet with leaders of Black fraternities and sororities together with Kamala Harris at 3.30pm.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre takes reporters’ questions at 1pm. More
