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      Neighbors say Alitos used security detail car to intimidate them after sign dispute

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      Neighbors of Samuel Alito and his wife described how a disagreement over political lawn signs put up in the wake of the 2020 presidential election quickly devolved into “unhinged behavior towards a complete stranger” by the supreme court justice’s wife.Emily Baden says she never intended to get into a fight with Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann, her powerful neighbors who live on the same suburban cul-de-sac as her mother outside Washington DC.Then a large black car, part of the Alitos’ security detail, started parking in front of her mother’s house instead of theirs, and Baden understood the perils of being an ordinary citizen going up against one of the most powerful men in the country.The two sides do not agree on much, but Baden, a staunch liberal, and Martha-Ann Alito, a staunch conservative, concur that they began exchanging words in late 2020, almost two months after Joe Biden’s election victory over Donald Trump. Soon after, according to Baden, the Alitos’ security detail began parking a car directly in front of her mother’s house – several houses down from its usual spots either directly in front of the Alitos or across the street from them.“This happened a handful of times,” Baden now recalls. “I took that as directly threatening.”Baden and her husband both say that the security detail’s car showed up in front of her mother’s house again two weeks ago, after the New York Times broke the story about an upside-down American flag hanging on the Alitos’ flagpole in the days before Biden’s inauguration – a symbol associated with the January 6 insurrection that sought to prevent Biden from taking office at all.Baden was no longer living with her mother by that point – she is now a mother herself and living on the west coast. Neither she nor her mother were mentioned by name in the initial Times story. Still, she found the message that this sent disturbing.“I couldn’t say who was in the car because of the tinted glass, and nobody ever said anything. I took it as a general threat,” she said. “The message was, we could do terrible things to you, and nobody would be able to do anything about it. When it comes to justices at the supreme court, they make the laws, but the laws don’t apply to them.”Baden’s husband, who did not want to be identified by name, said he, too, remembered a large black security SUV parking in front of their house, most memorably after Martha-Ann Alito confronted the couple in February 2021 and Baden let an expletive fly at the justice’s wife.“Right after, a security vehicle moved in front of our house and stayed for the remainder of the night,” he recalled.The Alitos did not immediately respond to a request from the Guardian for comment.Baden is an unusual witness to the Alito flag controversy and furore it has unleashed, because she never saw the upside-down flag flying outside the Alitos’ house and did not hear about it until the story hit the headlines two weeks ago.When the Times first contacted her, she said she didn’t want to be in any story because she had nothing to add. That changed when Alito put out a statement saying that his wife had briefly hung the flag in response to a neighbor’s use of “objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs”.Baden realised this was a reference to her. It both incensed and frightened her.“He’s lying about many, many things in that statement,” she claims. Contrary to Alito’s assertions, she alleged, it was not true that she had initiated any confrontation. She said it was also untrue that her lawn signs were directed personally at the justice or his wife.In Baden’s version of events, Martha-Ann Alito first approached her to complain about a home-made cardboard sign that said “Bye Don” on one side and “Fuck Trump” on the other – sentiments found on many similar signs around their neighborhood in Alexandria, Virginia, and in the rest of the country.Alito took further umbrage after January 6 when Baden erected signs that read “Trump Is a Fascist” and “You Are Complicit” – the latter intended, Baden says, as a condemnation of all Trump supporters, not as a message to the Alitos, who had no direct view of it from their house.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe next day, according to Baden, Martha-Ann Alito pulled up in front of their house in her car and glared at her and her partner (now her husband). The security detail started parking outside the house around the same time, and the dispute continued for more than a month, culminating in the swearing incident in mid-February and a police report that the Badens filed right after.“This was unhinged behavior towards a complete stranger, who had done nothing except put up a yard sign,” Baden charged. “I became truly afraid of what they might do.”That fear also made her hesitate about agreeing to be named publicly. She knows how quickly people can be vilified when stepping into a high-profile political controversy, and she has thought of Anita Hill, who tried in vain to stop Clarence Thomas being named to the supreme court in the early 1990s, and of Christine Blasey Ford, who testified against Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings in 2018, also to no avail.“I was scared for myself, for my mother, for my family, for anyone who shares my last name,” Baden said.Then news broke of a second flag affiliated with the “Stop the Steal” movement being flown at a second Alito home, and she felt she had no choice but to speak out.“That other flag sealed the deal for me,” she said. “I thought, if I don’t use my name, I will not be true to myself and my lifelong convictions. I believe in resistance to fascism. My grandpa fought in world war two … he was a person who quite literally fought against fascism.”Her view of Alito was further coloured by the fact that he wrote the majority opinion in the 2022 Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization – the decision that overturned Roe v Wade and ended a constitutional right to an abortion. She happened to be in Virginia when the news broke, and participated in street protests outside the Alitos’ home, at which point her signs (and almost everyone else’s) were indeed personally directed at the justice.Now, she feels compelled to add her voice to the growing calls for Alito to recuse himself from Trump-related cases before the supreme court and is willing to testify before Congress, as Hill and Blasey Ford did before her.“This story is not about me. I didn’t do anything except put a sign in my front yard,” she said. “The story is that one of the most powerful men in the country showed allegiance to an insurrection … I’m horrified by this behaviour, and want to see at least a modicum of accountability.“If I’m coming forward, it is to encourage other people to resist. I want to galvanise people and let them know they have the power. It truly gives me chills to think how close we came to a coup, and Christian fascists taking over our country. [But] this is still a democracy.” More

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      Supreme court chief justice declines to meet US senators about Alito upside-down flag furor – as it happened

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      In a statement, the Biden campaign’s Black media director, Jasmine Harris, accused Donald Trump of racism after a former producer on The Apprentice accused him of using a racial slur on set:
      No one is surprised that Donald Trump, who entered public life by falsely accusing Black men of murder and entered political life spreading lies about the first Black president, reportedly used the N-word to casually denigrate a successful Black man. Anyone notice a pattern? Donald Trump is exactly who Black voters know him to be: a textbook racist who disrespects and attacks the Black community every chance he gets, and the most ignorant man to ever run for president. It’s why Black voters kicked him out of the White House in 2020, and it’s why they’ll make him a loser a second time this November.
      The Biden campaign launched a new attack against Donald Trump, accusing him of racism after a former producer on The Apprentice said he used an anti-Black slur on the set. Meanwhile, jury deliberations are ongoing in Trump’s business fraud trial in New York City, and a verdict could be delivered at anytime. Earlier in the day, the supreme court released a batch of new opinions, covering topics from banking regulation to free speech rights. But the conservative-dominated court did not yet weigh in on Trump’s claim of immunity from prosecution over the 2020 election, or two abortion-related cases, all of which remain pending before the justices. Another batch of opinions is expected next Thursday.Here’s what else happened today:
      Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman and Trump antagonist, proposed a way to force conservative justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to recuse themselves from January 6 cases.
      John Roberts, the supreme court’s chief justice, declined a request for a meeting from two Democratic senators concerned over Alito’s flag flap.
      Do swing state voters care if Trump is convicted in his New York business fraud trial? Our reporters searched for the answer.
      Most evidence in the New York case seems to point to Trump’s guilt, but the jury could reach a variety of conclusions.
      Trump can sue his niece Mary Trump for potentially violating the terms of a settlement over his father’s estate, a New York state appeals court ruled.
      Should Donald Trump win the November election, the Guardian’s Robert Tait reports that his ally, speaker of the House Mike Johnson, is prepared to move quickly to pass his agenda through Congress. Here’s what Johnson told Semafor he is looking at:Mike Johnson, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, is planning a sweeping ideological legislative drive that aims to make Donald Trump “the most consequential president of the modern era” if the Republicans win power in November.A far-reaching bill containing a range of policy priorities at once – including tax cuts worth trillions, border security and rolling back Obamacare – is being prepared to avoid the mistakes the GOP believed happened early in Trump’s first term, when Johnson says the party wasted time because its victory over Hillary Clinton took it by surprise.In an interview with Semafor, Johnson said he had already spoken to Trump about introducing an omnibus package immediately after he retakes office.“I told him that I believe he can be the most consequential president of the modern era, if we are focused on a policy and agenda-driven administration and Congress – and that’s our intention,” Johnson said.“We don’t want to make the mistake that we made in the past. Back in the 2017 timeframe and in previous years, we Republicans kind of took a single-subject approach. We did one round of healthcare reform, one round of tax reform. But for [fiscal year 2025], we want to have a much larger scope, multiple issues to address in addition to the expiration of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.”For the second time in as many days, Donald Trump has defended supreme court justice Samuel Alito amid criticism from Democrats over his display of flags associated with rightwing causes.Alito, an appointee of Republican president George W Bush, is a reliably conservative vote on the court, and Trump has loudly denounced the Democratic lawmakers who have called for him to recuse himself from cases dealing with January. Here’s what the ex-president wrote, on Truth Social:
      ‘Playing the Ref’ with Justice Alito doesn’t work. It works with many others, but not with him!
      Here’s more from the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington about the firestorm around conservative supreme court justice Samuel Alito, and the rightwing flags found flying at his residences:Justice Samuel Alito is rejecting calls to step aside from supreme court cases involving the former president Donald Trump and January 6 defendants because of the controversy over flags that flew over his homes.In letters to members of Congress on Wednesday, Alito says his wife was responsible for flying an upside-down US flag over his home in 2021 and an “Appeal to Heaven” flag at his New Jersey beach house last year.Neither incident merits his recusal, he wrote.“I am therefore duty-bound to reject your recusal request,” he wrote.The court is considering two major cases related to the 6 January 2021 attack by a mob of Trump supporters on the Capitol, including charges faced by the rioters and whether the former president has immunity from prosecution on election-interference charges.Alito has rejected calls from Democrats in the past to recuse on other issues.In his letter to the Democratic leaders of the Senate judiciary committee, supreme court chief justice John Roberts argued it would be inappropriate to meet with them.“I must respectfully decline your request for a meeting,” wrote Roberts, who was appointed by Republican president George W Bush, and is considered among the more moderate of the court’s conservative justices.He continued in the letter addressed to the committee’s chair Dick Durbin and senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who chairs the subcommittee on federal courts:
      As noted in my letter to Chairman Durbin last April, apart from ceremonial events, only on rare occasions in our Nation’s history has a sitting Chief Justice met with legislators, even in a public setting (such as a Committee hearing) with members of both major political parties present. Separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence counsel against such appearances. Moreover, the format proposed – a meeting with leaders of only one party who have expressed an interest in matters currently pending before the Court – simply underscores that participating in such a meeting would be inadvisable.
      Last week, the two Democrats had requested a meeting with Roberts, after reports emerged that conservative justice Samuel Alito had flown flags associated with rightwing causes at two of his properties.“We therefore call for Justice Alito to recuse himself from certain proceedings as outlined above, renew our call for the Supreme Court to adopt an enforceable code of conduct for Supreme Court justices, and request a meeting with you as soon as possible. Until the Court and the Judicial Conference take meaningful action to address this ongoing ethical crisis, we will continue our efforts to enact legislation to resolve this crisis,” Durbin and Whitehouse wrote to Roberts.John Roberts, the chief justice of the US supreme court, has rebuffed a request from senior Democratic US senators to meet as the lawmakers push for supreme court justice Samuel Alito to recuse himself from cases before the court that relate to Donald Trump and will ripple into the 2024 presidential election.Roberts declined an invitation to talk about supreme court ethics and the controversy over flags that flew outside homes owned by Alito, the Associated Press further reports.Roberts’ response came in a letter to Democratic senators Dick Durbin a day after Alito separately wrote to them and House of Representatives members to reject their demands that he recuse himself from major cases involving Trump and the January 6 rioters because of the flags, which are like those carried by some rioters at the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol.Senate judiciary committee chair Dick Durbin of Illinois and senator and committee member Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island had written Roberts a week ago to ask for the meeting and ask that Roberts take steps to ensure that Alito recuses himself from any cases before the court concerning the January 6 attack or former president Trump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat.Trump, the Guardian adds, is being prosecuted in a federal criminal case on charges relating to election interference and obstructing an official proceeding. The supreme court will rule next month on two cases before it that have grave implications in that case, and for the election.A recap that a year ago a judge in New York threw out Donald Trump’s 2021 lawsuit accusing New York Times reporters of an “insidious plot” to obtain his tax records.Trump was ordered to pay all attorneys’ fees and legal expenses that the Times and its reporters had incurred. The lawsuit alleged that the newspaper sought out Trump’s niece Mary Trump and persuaded her “to smuggle the records out of her attorney’s office”.At the time, Trump’s claim against his niece had not been ruled on. Today, we learned that Donald is permitted to proceed with suing Mary.The Times’s 2018 Pulitzer-winning stories relied on information from Mary Trump to cast doubt on the ex-president’s claims that he was a self-made millionaire, showing that he had inherited hundreds of millions through “dubious tax schemes”. The series also revealed a history of tax avoidance.Robert Reed, the New York supreme court justice, said at the time of his ruling, in May 2023, that Trump’s claims “fail as a matter of constitutional law”, which allows for reporters to engage in legal, ordinary news-gathering. “These actions are at the very core of protected first amendment activity,” Reed wrote.Alina Habba, a lawyer for Donald Trump, said the former president looked forward to holding his niece, Mary Trump, “fully accountable for her blatant and egregious breach of contract” in her exchanges with New York Times journalists for a story about her uncle’s finances and evasive tax habits.Thursday’s decision upheld a June 2023 ruling by Justice Robert Reed of the New York state supreme court.Also, Reed had dismissed Donald Trump’s claims against the New York Times and three reporters, and in January ordered him to pay $392,639 of their legal fees, Reuters reports.In November 2022, Reed dismissed Mary Trump’s separate lawsuit accusing her uncle and two of his siblings of defrauding her out of a multimillion-dollar inheritance.The New York Times’ reporting challenged Donald Trump’s claim that he was a self-made billionaire. It said he received the equivalent of $413m from his father, largely the result of “dubious” tax schemes in the 1990s, including undervaluing his family’s real estate holdings. Donald Trump has denied wrongdoing.Mary Trump previously identified herself as a Times source in her 2020 tell-all bestseller Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.Here’s more on the news that a court has said Donald Trump can sue his niece Mary Trump.The court in New York ruled that the former president can sue Mary Trump, 59, a psychologist and writer, for supplying information to the New York Times as part of its coverage into the then president’s finances and his alleged effort to avoid taxes. The coverage won the Pulitzer prize.The appellate division in Manhattan found a “substantial” legal basis for Donald Trump to claim that his niece violated confidentiality provisions of a 2001 settlement over the estate of his father, Fred Trump Sr, Reuters reports.A five-judge panel said it was unclear whether Mary Trump’s disclosures were subject to confidentiality, or how long both sides intended the provisions to remain in effect. It also signaled that Donald Trump might deserve only minimal damages, not the $100m he sought.The court said:
      At a minimum, nominal damages may still be available on the breach of contract claim even in the absence of actual damages.
      Lawyers for Mary Trump said the lawsuit violated a state law barring frivolous cases designed to silence critics and “chill and retaliate against” their free speech. These cases are called strategic lawsuits against public participation, or Slapps.Anne Champion, Mary Trump’s lawyer, said in a statement:
      Mary has made valuable contributions to the public’s knowledge of the former president with her unique perspective as a family member. We are confident she will be vindicated as the case proceeds.
      Champion also said Donald Trump “can claim no injury for the publication of truthful information.”A New York state appeals court said Donald Trump can sue his niece Mary Trump for giving the New York Times information for its Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 probe into his finances and his alleged effort to avoid taxes.The appellate division in Manhattan found a “substantial” legal basis for Donald Trump to claim that his niece violated confidentiality provisions of a 2001 settlement over the estate of his father, Fred Trump Sr, Reuters reports.More to come on this. Adding from the Guardian, Trump originally sued his estranged niece and the New York Times in 2021 over a 2018 story about his family’s wealth and tax practices that was partly based on confidential documents she provided to the newspaper’s reporters, and there has been a whole legal odyssey ever since.The Biden campaign has launched a new attack against Donald Trump, accusing him of racism after a former producer on The Apprentice said he used an anti-Black racial slur on the set. Meanwhile, jury deliberations are ongoing in Trump’s business fraud trial in New York City, and a verdict could be delivered at anytime. Earlier in the day, the supreme court released a batch of new opinions, covering topics from banking regulation to free speech rights. But the conservative-dominated court did not yet weigh in on Trump’s claim of immunity from prosecution over the 2020 election, or two abortion-related cases, all of which remain pending before the justices. Another batch of opinions is expected next Thursday.Here’s what else has happened today:
      Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman and Trump antagonist, proposed a way to force conservative justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to recuse themselves from January 6 cases.
      Do swing state voters care if Trump is convicted in his New York business fraud trial? Our reporters searched for the answer.
      Most evidence in the New York case seems to point to Trump’s guilt, but the jury could rule in any direction.
      In a statement, the Biden campaign’s Black media director, Jasmine Harris, accused Donald Trump of racism after a former producer on The Apprentice accused him of using a racial slur on set:
      No one is surprised that Donald Trump, who entered public life by falsely accusing Black men of murder and entered political life spreading lies about the first Black president, reportedly used the N-word to casually denigrate a successful Black man. Anyone notice a pattern? Donald Trump is exactly who Black voters know him to be: a textbook racist who disrespects and attacks the Black community every chance he gets, and the most ignorant man to ever run for president. It’s why Black voters kicked him out of the White House in 2020, and it’s why they’ll make him a loser a second time this November.
      In addition to handing the National Rifle Association a lifeline in its lawsuit against New York state, the supreme court also denied resentencing to an Arizona man on death row, the Guardian’s Joanna Walters reports:The US supreme court issued opinions on Thursday relating to free speech and the death penalty, in one case clearing the way for a National Rifle Association (NRA) lawsuit against a former New York state official.The court gave a boost to the influential gun rights group that has accused the official of coercing banks and insurers to avoid doing business with it and, in the process, violating the NRA’s free speech rights.The justices, in a unanimous decision from the nine-member bench, threw out a lower court’s ruling that dismissed the NRA’s 2018 lawsuit against Maria Vullo, a former superintendent of New York’s department of financial services.The NRA, in the case NRA v Vullo, claimed that Vullo unlawfully retaliated against it following a mass shooting in which 17 people were killed at a high school in Parkland, Florida.The NRA was represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the Biden administration argued some of its claims should go forward, an unusual alliance between often opposing parties considering the NRA is a strongly Republican-aligned organization.Meanwhile, the supreme court, in a 6-3 decision, struck down an appeals court ruling giving Danny Lee Jones a new sentencing hearing in a death penalty case in Arizona. The conservative supermajority decided that errors in Jones’s legal defense, in the case Thornell v Jones, did not justify him having a chance at resentencing.The supreme court just scheduled its next opinion release day.The court is expected to issue more decisions on Thursday, 6 June. Among the pending cases is Donald Trump’s claim of immunity from prosecution over trying to overturn the 2020 election, and two lawsuits related to abortion access. More

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      Alito refuses to step aside from Trump supreme court cases amid flag scandal

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      Justice Samuel Alito is rejecting calls to step aside from supreme court cases involving the former president Donald Trump and January 6 defendants because of the controversy over flags that flew over his homes.In letters to members of Congress on Wednesday, Alito says his wife was responsible for flying an upside-down US flag over his home in 2021 and an “Appeal to Heaven” flag at his New Jersey beach house last year.Neither incident merits his recusal, he wrote.“I am therefore duty-bound to reject your recusal request,” he wrote.The court is considering two major cases related to the 6 January 2021 attack by a mob of Trump supporters on the Capitol, including charges faced by the rioters and whether the former president has immunity from prosecution on election interference charges.Alito has rejected calls from Democrats in the past to recuse on other issues.The New York Times reported that an inverted American flag was seen at Alito’s home in Alexandria, Virginia, less than two weeks after the attack on the Capitol.The paper also reported that an “Appeal to Heaven” flag was flown outside the justice’s beach home in New Jersey last summer. Both flags were carried by rioters who violently stormed the Capitol in January 2021 echoing Trump’s false claims of election fraud.Alito said he was unaware that the upside-down flag was flying above his house until it was called to his attention. “As soon as I saw it, I asked my wife to take it down, but for several days, she refused,” he wrote in nearly identical letters to Democrats in the House and Senate.Trump praised Alito’s rebuff of demands for his recusal, posting on his Truth Social account that the rightwing justice had showed “INTELLIGENCE, COURAGE, and ‘GUTS’”. Writing as he waited for the jury to return its verdict at his criminal hush-money trial in New York, Trump added: “All US Judges, Justices and Leaders should have such GRIT”.Alito’s flat-out refusal to address doubts about his impartiality in the wake of the flags scandal underlines the weakness of the supreme court’s current ethical guidelines. Following a public outcry over undeclared luxury trips and other gifts that had been received by Alito and his fellow hard-right justice Clarence Thomas, the court was forced to adopt its first ethics code last November.To the dismay of advocates of judicial reform, however, the code contained no enforcement provision. Individual justices are left to their own devices to decide whether or not they should recuse from cases in which there might be an appearance or reality of conflict of interest or impartiality.Thomas has also been accused of conflict of interest after he became the only vote on the court to oppose the release of digital communications to the congressional committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. It later transpired that the stash of documents included emails between Thomas’s wife, the conservative activist Ginni Thomas, and Trump’s then top White House aide Mark Meadows over how to block Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.The lack of response from either Thomas or Alito to the welter of criticism over their ethical positions is starting to attract the attention of Congress.In an opinion article in the New York Times, Jamie Raskin, the Democratic Congress member from Maryland who led the second impeachment trial of Trump, said that it was “unfathomable that the two justices could get away with deciding for themselves whether they can be impartial in ruling on cases affecting Donald Trump’s liability for crimes he is accused of committing on January 6”.Raskin proposed a solution to the conundrum: the US justice department could petition the other seven justices on the nine-member supreme court under the federal recusal statute to require Alito and Thomas to recuse themselves in the January 6 cases. “The supreme court cannot disregard this law just because it directly affects one or two of its justices,” Raskin wrote.Democratic leaders in the US Senate are also pressuring the court to take more robust action. The Senate judiciary chairman, Dick Durbin, and fellow committee member Sheldon Whitehouse have written to the chief justice, John Roberts, asking for a meeting to discuss what he was proposing to do about Alito’s refusal to recuse himself.The Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      Samuel Alito’s wife claimed upside-down flag was ‘international sign of distress’

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      The wife of US supreme court justice Samuel Alito reportedly justified the display of an upside-down American flag at the couple’s home by saying it was “an international signal of distress”, as senior Democrats have requested a meeting with the chief justice over the growing scandal.Martha-Ann Alito made the comments to a Washington Post reporter, the outlet reported on Saturday, when the journalist visited the couple’s Virginia home in January 2021, not long after the attack on the US Capitol by extremist supporters of Donald Trump.She reportedly told the Washington Post at the time that the flag had been run up their flagpole in that way in response to a neighborhood dispute.Flying the Stars and Stripes flag upside down is acceptable as a rare distress signal, according to the official US flag code. But these days it is more often associated with activists making an extremist sign of protest, and at the time of the January 6 insurrection it had been adopted by some on the far right amid efforts, ultimately unsuccessful, to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory over Trump.The Washington Post report said on Saturday, quoting the outlet’s own spokesperson, that “the Post decided not to report on the episode at the time because the flag-raising appeared to be the work of Martha-Ann Alito, rather than the justice, and connected to a dispute with her neighbors … It was not clear then that the argument was rooted in politics.”In another twist, it was the New York Times that first reported earlier this week the display of the American flag in that fashion at the Alitos’ residence in early 2021, during a political row with neighbors.That was swiftly followed by a second report from the Times that another flag, one originally associated with the American revolution but now associated with the far right and known as the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, was flying last year above a holiday home of the Alitos in New Jersey.View image in fullscreenTwo leading Democratic senators are requesting a meeting with the supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, in the wake of these reports. This comes on top of calls demanding that Justice Alito recuse himself from election-related cases before the court and face investigation by the US Senate, the congressional chamber that confirms federal and supreme court judges.The Senate judiciary committee chair, Dick Durbin, and the senator and judiciary committee member Sheldon Whitehouse wrote a letter to Roberts earlier this week asking him for a meeting to discuss court ethics and to take steps to ensure that Alito recuses himself from any cases before the court concerning the January 6 attack or Trump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat.The court did not respond to a request for comment regarding the letter.The court is considering two major cases related to the Capitol attack, including one related to charges faced by the rioters and another on whether Trump has immunity from prosecution on election interference charges. Alito is participating in both cases and has rejected calls from Democrats in the past to recuse himself on other issues.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlito earlier said he had no part in the flying of the inverted American flag. He and the court declined to respond to requests for comment on how the “Appeal to Heaven” banner came to be flying and what it was intended to express.Durbin and Whitehouse said they will continue to pressure the court. The plea for a meeting is a new approach after Roberts declined to testify at a hearing on supreme court ethics last year, amid a scandal over accusations of political influence and corruption aimed at Alito and Clarence Thomas, the two most conservative justices on the supreme court bench.“Until the court and the judicial conference take meaningful action to address this ongoing ethical crisis, we will continue our efforts to enact legislation to resolve this crisis,” Durbin and Whitehouse wrote.The American Legion US flag code states of the Stars and Stripes that “the flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property”.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Supreme court rules South Carolina doesn’t need to redraw congressional map to consider Black voters

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      South Carolina Republicans do not need to redraw their congressional map, the US supreme court ruled on Thursday, saying that a lower court had not properly evaluated the evidence when it ruled that the lawmakers had discriminated against Black voters.In a 6-3 decision, the justices sent the case back to the lower court for further consideration. The decision, in Alexander v South Carolina Conference of the NAACP, is a major win for Republicans, who hold a slim margin in the US House with six of South Carolina’s seven congressional seats. It also could give lawmakers more leeway to discriminate in redistricting and use partisanship as a proxy for race. That could be enormously powerful in the US south, where voting is often racially polarized.“A party challenging a map’s constitutionality must disentangle race and politics if it wishes to prove that the legislature was motivated by race as opposed to partisanship. Second, in assessing a legislature’s work, we start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” wrote Samuel Alito in an opinion that was joined by the court’s five other conservative justices.“The three-judge district court paid only lip service to these propositions. That misguided approach infected the district court’s findings of fact, which were clearly erroneous under the appropriate legal standard.”The dispute centered on the way the Republicans who control the state legislature redrew the state’s first congressional district after the 2020 census. After Nancy Mace narrowly was elected in 2020, they shifted the district’s boundaries to make it much friendlier to Republicans. As part of that effort, they moved 30,000 Black voters from Mace’s first district to the sixth, currently represented by Jim Clyburn, a Black Democrat. A lower court had ruled that lawmakers had impermissibly relied on race when they drew it after the 2020 census, saying they had to redraw the district.The case had dragged on for so long, however, that the lower court and the supreme court recently allowed South Carolina to use the district for this year’s election.Mac Deford, an attorney challenging Mace, observed oral arguments in person. Deford said he watched Chief Justice John Roberts wrestle with the connection between race and politics.“From my viewpoint, there was some signaling that they were going to draw some sort of line between race and politics. And I think that they did in this case,” Deford said, noting how in the earlier decision Shelby v Holder Roberts had proposed the idea that southern legislators had long abandoned heavy-handed racial discrimination in voting.“This could be sort of setting the stage for a subsequent case, maybe next year, that could be brought on the Voting Rights Act that could further strip away the vote.”The challengers in the case, the South Carolina branch of the NAACP and a South Carolina voter, argued that those actions violated the 14th amendment’s ban on sorting voters based on race. South Carolina Republicans argued that they were motivated by partisanship, not race.In 2019, the supreme court said that there was nothing federal courts could do to stop gerrymandering based on partisanship. Sorting voters based on race, however, still remains unlawful. This was the first case that came to the court since its 2019 decision, forcing the justices to clarify their standard when the two issues are intermingled.The lower court had relied on a trove of evidence and experts that the challengers offered to conclude that South Carolina Republicans were sorting voters based on their race. One of those experts used an algorithm to draw 20,000 maps that didn’t take race into account but complied with traditional redistricting criteria. But Alito and the other conservative justices said that evidence was not good enough.Alito zeroed in on the fact that the challengers in the case had not offered an alternative map that achieved the partisan goals of Republican lawmakers – a safe Republican district – and that also had a higher Black voting age population as the challenged district. Such a map, he wrote, was critical to proving that South Carolina Republicans had considered race above other considerations.“Without an alternative map, it is difficult for plaintiffs to defeat our starting presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” he wrote.That rationale drew a sharp rebuke from Elena Kagan, who accused the majority of getting the decision “seriously wrong” and inventing “a new rule of evidence”.“As of today, courts must draw an adverse inference against those plaintiffs when they do not submit a so-called alternative map – no matter how much proof of a constitutional violation they otherwise present,” the liberal justice wrote in an opinion. “Such micro-management of a plaintiff ’s case is elsewhere unheard of in constitutional litigation. But as with its upside-down application of clear-error review, the majority is intent on changing the usual rules when it comes to addressing racial-gerrymandering claims.”Kagan went on to outline how Thursday’s decision would give states much more leeway to enact discriminatory maps and voting policies.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“In every way, the majority today stacks the deck against the challengers. They must lose, the majority says, because the state had a ‘possible’ story to tell about not considering race – even if the opposite story was the more credible,” Kagan wrote in the opinion, which was joined by the court’s two other liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.“When racial classifications in voting are at issue, the majority says, every doubt must be resolved in favor of the state, lest (heaven forfend) it be ‘accus[ed]’ of ‘offensive and demeaning’ conduct.”Leah Aden, a lawyer at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund who argued the case on behalf of the plaintiffs at the supreme court in October, said the decision “usurps the authority of trial courts to make factual findings of racial discrimination as the unanimous panel found occurred with South Carolina’s design of congressional district 1”. She said the challengers would continue to fight to redraw the map at the lower court.Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, said Alito and the court majority had “once again come up with a legal framework that makes it easier for Republican states to engage in redistricting to help white Republicans maximize their political power”.“He did so by reversing the burden of proof that should apply in these cases in two ways to favor these states: pushing a ‘presumption of good faith’ and raising the evidentiary burdens for those challenging the maps,” he wrote on his blog.Clarence Thomas, a conservative justice, also wrote a lengthy separate concurring opinion in the case saying that federal courts should not be involved in policing constitutional claims of racial discrimination in redistricting – a radical idea that would be a break with the court’s longstanding jurisprudence. “It behooves us to abandon our misguided efforts and leave districting to politicians,” he wrote. The concurrence was not joined by any of the other justices.Joe Biden also criticized the decision in a statement Thursday afternoon.“The Supreme Court’s decision today undermines the basic principle that voting practices should not discriminate on account of race and that is wrong,” he said. “This decision threatens South Carolinians’ ability to have their voices heard at the ballot box, and the districting plan the Court upheld is part of a dangerous pattern of racial gerrymandering efforts from Republican elected officials to dilute the will of Black voters.”George Chidi contributed reporting More

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      Leading Democrats demand Alito face investigation after second report of far right-linked flag

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      Leading Democrats are demanding that Samuel Alito recuse himself from election-related cases and also face investigation after a second report that a flag now associated with the far right was flying above one of his homes.Dick Durbin, the Senate judiciary chair, urged the US supreme court justice to step back from certain major cases and demanded John Roberts, the chief justice, implement an enforceable code of conduct on his bench, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez demanded that the US Senate investigate.The demands follow a new report by the New York Times of a second incidence of flags flown at homes of Alito that are associated with the 6 January 2021 attack at the US Capitol.Durbin put out a statement late on Wednesday, saying: “This incident is yet another example of apparent ethical misconduct by a sitting justice, and it adds to the court’s ongoing ethical crisis. For the good of our country and the court, Justice Alito must recuse himself immediately from cases related to the 2020 election and the January 6th insurrection. And the chief justice must see how this is damaging the court and immediately enact an enforceable code of conduct.”Ocasio-Cortez also weighed in during an interview with the MSNBC host Chris Hayes late on Wednesday, calling on Senate Democrats to launch “active investigations”.The congresswoman said: “What we are seeing here is an extraordinary breach of not just the trust and the stature of the supreme court, but we are seeing a fundamental challenge to our democracy.”She added: “Samuel Alito has identified himself with the same people who raided the Capitol on January 6 and is now going to be presiding over court cases that have deep implications over the participants of that rally.“And while this is the threat to our democracy, Democrats have a responsibility for defending our democracy.”The New York Times reported that an “appeal to heaven” flag, which has been adopted by Christian nationalists, was flown at the summer home of Alito on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, last July and September. The flag was carried by some in the crowd during the far-right, violent insurrection at the US Capitol, where extremist supporters of Donald Trump broke in to try, in vain, to stop the US Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election over Trump.Also known as the pine tree flag, it was originally used on warships commanded by George Washington during the American revolutionary war against the ruling British. It has since been adopted by Christian nationalists who advocate for an American government based on Christian teachings.The second flag report comes after the paper also reported that an upside-down American flag was flown outside the Virginia residence of Alito’s home shortly after the January 6 insurrection. Alito claimed his wife flew the flag briefly during a spat with neighbors over politics.Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, posted on X: “Flying this flag is a political statement that is a clear and compelling reason for Alito’s recusal. He cannot responsibly sit on Trump-related cases when he has already signaled his sympathy with January 6th rioters. He owes the American people an explanation.”Sheldon Whitehouse also posted, with pictures of the offending flags.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Rhode Island Democratic senator said on X: “Did another neighbor make Alito’s wife mad? How many Maga battle flags does Alito need to fly for the court or the judicial conference to see there’s a problem?”Durbin has been pushing for regulation of the supreme court.He added: “This episode will further erode public faith in the court. The Senate judiciary committee has been investigating the ethical crisis at the court for more than a year, and that investigation continues. And we remain focused on ensuring the supreme court adopts an enforceable code of conduct, which we can do by passing the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act.”He has repeatedly called for the passing of legislation that the judiciary committee advanced last July. The supreme court has an internal, non-binding code of ethics.Neither the supreme court nor Alito had commented by Thursday morning. More

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      in US Politics

      Another provocative flag flown at Samuel Alito residence, report says

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      Another type of provocative flag that was flown during the breach of the US Capitol by extremist supporters of Donald Trump on 6 January 2021 was reportedly flown outside a summer residence of US supreme court justice Samuel Alito – following a similar, prior incident outside his main residence.Last summer, the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which originates from the Revolutionary war and has in recent years become a symbol of far-right Christian extremism, was flown outside Alito’s summer home in Long Beach Island, New Jersey, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.According to photographs obtained by the outlet and interviews with multiple neighbors and passersby, the flag was flown last July and September. The newspaper reported that the flag was visible in a Google Street View image from late August. It remains unclear whether the flag was flown consistently throughout last summer.The New York Times report comes just days after it reported that an upside-down American flag was flown outside Alito’s Virginia home just days after the January 6 Capitol riots.The Appeal to Heaven flag, also commonly known as the Pine Tree flag, was spotted among other controversial flags waved in Washington on 6 January 2021 when rioters and insurrectionists stormed the US Capitol, encouraged by Trump, then the president, over the false belief that the 2020 election had been won by him and not the actual victor, Joe Biden.The Capitol attack was aimed at stopping the official certification by Congress of Biden’s victory, which was delayed by the violence but finally happened in the early hours of the following morning.The Pine Tree flag was originally used on warships commanded by George Washington during the Revolutionary war. It has since been adopted by Christian nationalists who advocate for an American government based on Christian teachings.The first report of the Stars and Stripes being flown upside-down outside an Alito residence provoked outrage about the further politicization of the supreme court, but Alito simply said his wife had done it and it was displayed only briefly.The Guardian contacted the supreme court for comment on the latest report but did not receive an immediate response. More

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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