Alito’s Pathetic Defense for Refusing to Recuse Himself Over Flags
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on Wednesday rejected a congressional call to recuse himself from lawsuits relating to the 2020 presidential election—specifically, Trump v. United States.
In a letter to Senators Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse, Alito argued that his impartiality had not “reasonably” come into question and he therefore would not sit out from the immunity case that branched off of Donald Trump’s election interference trial.
Alito was accused of compromising the court’s impartiality after controversial, January 6–affiliated flags were spotted flying at two of his countryside homes: a “Stop the Steal” upside-down U.S. flag at his house in Arlington, Virginia, and an “Appeal to Heaven” flag—a Revolutionary War symbol adopted by Christian nationalists—at the judge’s New Jersey vacation home.
But the details of the flags and their meanings don’t matter at all, according to Alito, simply because he didn’t know about them.
“As I have stated publicly, I had nothing whatsoever to do with the flying of that flag,” Alito wrote. “I was not even aware of the upside-down flag until it was called to my attention. As soon as I saw it, I asked my wife to take it down, but for several days, she refused.”
Both instances, according to Alito, can be chalked up to having a wife who is “fond of flying flags”—regardless of her political leanings or his affiliation to her, her “reasons for flying the flag are not relevant” to his ability to weigh in on the immunity case, he claimed.
“She did not fly it to associate herself with that or any other group, and the use of an old historic flag by a new group does not necessarily drain that flag of all other meanings,” Alito argued. “A reasonable person who is not motivated by political or ideological considerations or a desire to affect the outcome of Supreme Court cases would conclude that this event does not meet the applicable standard for recusal. I am therefore duty-bound to reject your recusal request.”
It remains to be seen what further actions might be taken against the conservative justice, but it’s not the only formal reprimand on the table for Alito. Last week, Representative Steve Cohen introduced the censure resolution against the Supreme Court justice for “knowingly violating the Federal recusal statute and binding ethics standards and calling the impartiality of the Supreme Court of the United States into question.”
