Wave That Flag
Apparently, Sam Alito's wife has been spending a lot of time flying politically inappropriate flags.
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Back to Back Chicken Shack
So it seems that Samuel Alito’s wife has been awfully busy …
Last summer, two years after an upside-down American flag was flown outside the Virginia home of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., another provocative symbol was displayed at his vacation house in New Jersey, according to interviews and photographs.
This time, it was the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which, like the inverted U.S. flag, was carried by rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Also known as the Pine Tree flag, it dates back to the Revolutionary War, but largely fell into obscurity until recent years and is now a symbol of support for former President Donald J. Trump, for a religious strand of the “Stop the Steal” campaign and for a push to remake American government in Christian terms.
In a semi-normal political world, Alito would immediately recuse himself from the cases currently on the Supreme Court docket that deal with January 6. So far, he hasn’t, and there’s no reason to believe he will later. In a mature and properly functioning democracy, Alito would step down from the Supreme Court. These two flag incidents demonstrate that Alito is a partisan actor who is indifferent to the image of partiality that he is putting out to the world.
Of course, he almost certainly won’t.
We hear a lot of talk these days about the threat to democracy that a second Trump presidency would represent (and rightfully so). But these Alito flag stories are a helpful reminder that the phone call is coming from inside the house.
Indeed, I’d argue that Alito's refusal to recuse himself or step down from the Court is a more significant threat to American democracy than Trump's potential election as president.
When you’re a Supreme Court justice, and you fly multiple flags demonstrating a clear partisan lean, you are clearly indifferent to the appearance of political bias and advertising to the world that you don’t care. You’re basically telling the world this is who I am, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.
It shows that the highest Court in the land is not an arbiter of justice but rather a partisan actor. While many will rightly argue that the Supreme Court has long been a partisan body, Alito’s political flag-flying shows that he doesn’t care if he is perceived as such and is more than happy to lean into it.
In not even pretending to be nonpartisan, Alito is, in effect, thumbing his nose at perhaps the most basic norm for judicial actors. He is making a mockery of the federal judiciary and of the notion that judicial decision-making is based on the law and not narrow political advantage. He is telling the American people he doesn’t care if they view him as an impartial arbiter of justice or if they, in turn, see the Court as a fundamentally illegitimate institution of American democracy held captive by ostentatiously partisan political forces.
The French philosopher Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld famously described hypocrisy as "the tribute that vice pays to virtue." Alito has chosen to no longer pay the tribute.
You might ask why I consider Alito’s flag-flying a worse threat to democracy than Trump’s potential election. The reason, I believe, should be apparent. Alito’s norm-shattering behavior is happening right now before our eyes, and there is no recourse to undo it. Americans can head to the polls next Fall and vote for Joe Biden, ensuring that Trump never returns to the White House. If Trump is elected, there are potential checks on his political power (albeit one of them is the corrupted judiciary on which Alito serves).
But Alito isn’t going anywhere. He has a lifetime appointment to the Court, so he’s there until he dies or resigns, and the chance of the latter happening anytime soon (or while a Democrat is in the White House) is pretty much zero. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives won’t impeach him, and even if the Democrats take control next Fall and take that step, there is zero chance that two-thirds of Republican Senators would convict him.
Alito is there for the long haul — an unambiguously political actor on the highest Court in the land in the one institution of American democracy for which the appearance of neutrality is essential. And if Americans have a problem with that, they can go fly a … flag.
One More Thing
I made a fairly significant error in yesterday’s post on Arab-American voters. I suggested that most Arab Americans are Muslims. In fact, a super-majority of them are Christian, and only a quarter are Muslim.
In addition, an eagle-eyed reader made an excellent point about yesterday’s post about Arab-American voters: that they are more conservative than other minority groups. Now, this is true, but it needs to be caveated. According to polling done by Zogby Analytics/the Arab American Institute, in 2016, “ Arab Americans identified with Democrats over Republicans by a 26-percentage-point margin; by 2020, that Democratic edge was down to 8 points.” In addition, it appears that Trump did several points better with Muslim and Arab-American voters than he did in 2016.
My only trepidation about passing along this information is that it’s difficult to effectively poll minority communities (small sample size), and I’m not that confident in Zogby Analytics' polling. However, there is some basis for arguing that Arab-American voters are more socially conservative and could be alienated by the Democratic Party’s embrace of social liberalism. So, Arab-American voters may be shifting to the GOP for other reasons than just the war in Gaza.
One other thing to keep in mind: Arab Americans are a tiny minority group, and the only state where a major shift in voting patterns would likely have an impact is Michigan, where Arab-American voters are still less than 3 percent of the population. Of course, small margins matter a lot in a tight election, and if these voters switch from Biden to Trump, that could be decisive. But instead, if many stay home, the impact could be far more muted.
What’s Going On
Remember how the Biden Administration wanted Israel to ensure it evacuated Palestinians from Rafah before attacking the city? It turnss out that's happened, and the US is giving Israel credit.
The Associated Press has produced a deeply reported piece on how two false accounts of sexual assaults that took place on October 7 fed rape denialism.
Musical Interlude