An upside-down American flag was reportedly spotted flying outside the home of the conservative US supreme court justice Samuel Alito during the closing days of Donald Trump’s presidential term in 2021.
The inverted flag is a symbol that has become associated with Trump’s false claims that Joe Biden stole the election.
Used by some Trump supporters during the January 6 Capitol riot, the upside-down flag was seen outside Alito’s home on 17 January 2021 – 10 days after the riot in DC and three days before Biden’s inauguration, according to a report in the New York Times on Friday.
The image of the flag outside Alito’s home is likely to renew fears of partisanship among political appointees on the conservative-leaning court. The court has found itself at the center of US culture wars in recent years for the rulings it has made, including a rollback of reproductive rights and a relaxation of restrictions relating to gun ownership.
According to the Times, word of the upside-down flag made its way back to the court as the justices were considering an election case related to ballot-counting in Pennsylvania. Alito, an appointee of George W Bush, was on the losing side of the decision.
“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Alito said in a statement to the paper. “It was briefly placed by Mrs Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”
Alito later revealed to the Fox News anchor Shannon Bream that a neighbor called his wife an expletive, which is why she flew a US flag upside down.
Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann, had been in a dispute with a neighbor about an anti-Trump sign on their lawn. Neighbors said they interpreted the Alito family’s flag as a political statement, and one said it had hung outside the home for several days.
On MSNBC, Joe Scarborough offered an impassioned take on the flag’s appearance at Alito’s home, telling viewers of his show on Friday morning: “For a guy who is a supreme court justice that let that happen at his own home in one of the most fraught times in American history since the civil war is just … it’s just sad. And it shows how little respect he has for the institution. It shows how little respect he has for the law. It really … It’s disgusting. It’s just disgusting.”
Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, who appeared on Morning Joe on Friday alongside Scarborough, echoed those thoughts.
“I am beyond disturbed. I was a law clerk to Justice [Harry] Blackmun on the US supreme court when this kind of behavior would have been unimaginable. You wouldn’t have read about it in a book of fiction,” he said.
“Justice Alito should not sit on any of these cases involving Donald Trump. He ought to recuse himself. Here is the challenge to Chief Justice [John] Roberts: the US supreme court’s credibility is plummeting – lower than perhaps the US Congress, and that’s saying something. It is due to the supreme court’s own self-inflicted wounds.”
An upside-down American flag — a symbol embraced by Donald Trump’s supporters who falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen — flew at Justice Samuel Alito’s home while the Supreme Court was considering an election case in early 2021. https://t.co/erCgpAZIDj pic.twitter.com/uwQOBNFOJY
— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 16, 2024
Experts on judicial conduct told the Times that symbols of partiality, including flying an upside-down flag, could be a violation of ethics rules designed to avoid even the appearance of bias.
“It might be his spouse or someone else living in his home, but he shouldn’t have it in his yard as his message to the world,” Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia, told the Times.
Frost added that the inverted flag was “the equivalent of putting a ‘Stop the Steal’ sign in your yard, which is a problem if you’re deciding election-related cases”.
The US supreme court recently adopted a stronger but non-binding code of ethics for the nine justices on the bench after the conservative justice Clarence Thomas came under scrutiny for accepting but not disclosing trips funded by a Republican billionaire. It was later reported that Alito had similarly failed to report a trip to Alaska.
Court employees are under strict rules that warn against public displays of political affiliation, including bumper stickers on vehicles. According to Reuters, the flag should be displayed upside down only “as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property”.
The revelation that Martha-Ann Alito hung an upside-down flag in her yard may not provide a determination that Alito was in any way aligned with Trump-inspired insurrectionists but might only show that, during the 2020 election, neighborhood passions ran hot.
Neighbors told the Times that the street was divided between Republicans and Democrats and had been “tensed with conflict”. The anti-Trump sign that Martha-Ann Alito objected to, they said, contained an expletive and had led to mounting tensions.
One said neighbors had joined demonstrators outside the Alitos’ home with the intent “to bring the protest to their personal lives because the decisions affect our personal lives”. Those protests have continued. Last Saturday, some used a megaphone to broadcast expletives at Alito.
Two years ago, a bipartisan bill was passed to provide round-the-clock police protection for the justices and their families. That came after the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, ordered the US Marshals Service to provide 24/7 protection to the justices following the still-unexplained leak of a draft decision that overturned federal abortion rights guarantees.
But with political tensions again increasing as the November elections approach, including a supreme court decision on the extent of presidential immunity that will affect at least one of Donald Trump’s pending prosecutions, Alito’s neighborhood flag-flying comes down to “a question of appearances and the potential impact on public confidence in the court”, the former federal judge Jeremy Fogel told the Times.
“I think it would be better for the court if he weren’t involved in cases arising from the 2020 election,” Fogel added. “But I’m pretty certain that he will see that differently.”
