Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., requested a meeting last week with Chief Justice John Roberts to demand Justice Samuel Alito be removed from cases central to the Democrats’ fall campaign strategy. Alito, Durbin wrote in a joint letter with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., apparently disqualified himself from ruling on issues related to former President Donald Trump because the conservative justice flew a pair of flags Democrats don’t like.
The lawmakers’ letter cited a series of stories by The New York Times this month that set in motion the far left’s latest efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the last remaining institution to stand in the way of Democrats’ agenda. The Times reported that an upside-down American flag briefly flew at Alito’s Virginia residence in January 2021, and there was an “Appeal to Heaven” banner at his New Jersey home in Long Beach Island last summer.
The former was flown by his wife over a dispute with a neighbor who erected an anti-Trump sign, and the latter, also known as the Pine Tree flag, is an iconic emblem of appealing to a higher power with roots in the American Revolution. The Pine Tree flag was designed by George Washington’s personal secretary, and it flew outside the San Francisco City Hall last year.
According to The New York Times, however, both banners are far-right symbols of insurgency because a few wannabe revolutionaries carried them to the Capitol on Jan. 6.
“By displaying the upside-down and ‘Appeal to Heaven’ flags outside his homes,” Durbin and Whitehouse wrote, “Justice Alito actively engaged in political activity, failed to avoid the appearance of impropriety, and failed to act in a manner that promotes public confidence in the impartiality of the judiciary.”
Their next lines struck at the heart of what the fabricated flag controversy is all about. Alito, they wrote to the chief justice, “created reasonable doubt about his impartiality and his ability to fairly discharge his duties in cases related to the 2020 presidential election and January 6th attack on the Capitol. His recusal in these matters is both necessary and required.”
In June, the high court will hand down decisions that will determine whether Trump enjoys a high enough degree of presidential immunity to escape far-left prosecution and whether the Department of Justice (DOJ) has the authority to confer excess prison time on Jan. 6 defendants. Trump’s imprisonment is the Democrats’ central campaign strategy to maintain the White House and their Senate majority. Alito, who has built a reputation as one of the most reliably conservative justices on the Supreme Court, is apparently in the way considering the nine-justice panel could knock down several charges facing the former president.
The pair of far-left lawmakers probably felt emboldened to make the recusal demands by several Republican senators who bought into what Federalist Senior Legal Correspondent Margot Cleveland described as The New York Times’ “False Flag Operation To Take Down The Court.” In a separate piece last week, Cleveland outlined why the manufactured flag debacle offers no mandate for Alito to remove himself from politically sensitive cases, writing, “the Code of Conduct does not govern a spouse’s actions.”
Alito responded to the performative outrage from Capitol Hill on Wednesday with a letter to Durbin and Whitehouse.
“My wife is fond of flying flags. I am not,” Alito wrote. “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.”
Alito’s letter, however, won’t take the heat off the justice, who has now become the target of the far left’s campaign to undermine the judiciary for political ends. Democrats will probably request hearings, escalate calls for recusal, and even demand resignation or impeachment under the same playbook deployed against Justice Clarence Thomas.
Trump himself, meanwhile, has been fending off the Democrats’ weaponization of the judiciary to imprison him for years, with a New York jury beginning deliberations in the Manhattan hush money trial Wednesday. It’s not really Alito that the left is after. It’s Trump, with 88 state and federal charges filed against him designed to secure a quick and easy conviction. The integrity of the judiciary system, which is supposed to protect defendants against show trials, just needs to be dismantled first.
