Justice Samuel Alito’s flag scandal is inflicting a “fatal blow” in terms of people’s confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court, an attorney has said.
Writing in her blog Civil Discourse, Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama called Alito’s behavior “outrageous,” following reports he hung an upside-down U.S. flag outside his house following the 2020 election.
A New York Times report published on Thursday showed the photo of the inverted flag, which was taken outside Alito’s home in Alexandria, Virginia, on January 17, 2021, three days before President Joe Biden was inaugurated as president. It came soon after the Capitol Riot on January 6, 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building in Washington D.C. to stop Congress certifying Biden’s 2020 election win.
After then President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and claimed, without any evidence, that Biden’s victory was a sham, many of his supporters displayed an upside-down American flag as a sign of protest.
In a statement to the Times, Alito, who was nominated by Republican President, George W. Bush in 2005, blamed his wife for the inverted flag.
The saga then escalated when the Times, which cited photographs obtained by the newspaper and accounts from witnesses, published a further report claiming Alito’s summer home in Long Beach Island, New Jersey, displayed an “Appeal to Heaven” flag in July and September 2023.
The symbol is rooted in Revolutionary War-era naval vessels under first U.S. President George Washington, then commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. But, as the Times reported the flag has been used by conservatives in recent years, including by some Trump supporters during the January 6 riot.
Vance described it as “outrageous behavior for a judge” and said that allowing him to remain on Trump’s presidential immunity hearing showed “there is no shame in the court.”
“When you’re a Supreme Court justice, you’re supposed to avoid giving off even a whiff of partisan bias. Or religious favoritism. As a judge, and certainly, as a Supreme Court justice, you have that duty. Justice Alito flunks the test and flunks it badly.”
She questioned whether people can have confidence that Alito “is making decisions based on the law, not on his personal politics and religious beliefs.”
She said: “By his own conduct, he has made that impossible and undercut his ability to serve on the court without damaging, perhaps inflicting a fatal blow at this point, to public confidence in it.”
“We cannot let Justice Alito get away with it,” she added.
In a Friday blog, Vance said that under ethics rules, judges were not permitted to display political signs.
“Justice Alito seems to have forgotten, or perhaps he’s just flagrantly ignoring, the fundamental truth of this Republic, which is that judges are not meant to be above the law,” she wrote.
But while Alito has faced criticism from commentators, he also has had some support.
“The hysterical attacks on Alito’s family just got even dumber, if that’s even possible,” radio host and Daily Caller editor Vince Coglianese wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Now flying a flag associated with George Washington is a scandal. How completely stupid.”
