Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.\u2019s reason for skipping Joe Biden\u2019s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021, was presented by the court\u2019s spokeswoman: Several justices, presumably including Alito, \u201celected not to attend the inauguration ceremony in light of the public health risks posed by the COVID pandemic.\u201d<\/p>\n
So where were Alito and his wife headed that same afternoon when The Washington Post\u2019s Robert Barnes showed up at their house to ask about an upside-down flag that had flown outside their home?<\/p>\n
This new detail, the exchange between Barnes and the Alitos, emerged over the weekend. Barnes wrote The Post\u2019s January 2021 story about the justices who didn\u2019t attend the inauguration, including the quote from the spokeswoman. But when he arrived at their home in Northern Virginia, the Alitos were coming out of their house and getting into their car. Martha-Ann Alito, the justice\u2019s wife, asked Barnes to get off their property before being told why he was there.<\/p>\n
The flag, she exclaimed, was \u201can international signal of distress.\u201d For his part, Alito \u201cdenied the flag was hung upside down as a political protest, saying it stemmed from a neighborhood dispute and indicating that his wife had raised it,\u201d our recent report explained. This comports with what Alito told the New York Times when it sought comment on its original report about the upside-down flag.<\/p>\n
Flying a flag upside down is, in fact, a symbol of distress. And that was fairly common knowledge in January 2021, as the upside-down flag had become a symbol of resistance to Biden\u2019s forthcoming presidency and was carried by some who attended the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.<\/p>\n
A second report from the Times detailed the dispute with those neighbors. After the Capitol riot, reporter Jodi Kantor revealed, a house down the street from the Alitos put out homemade lawn signs reading \u201cTrump Is a Fascist\u201d and \u201cYou Are Complicit.\u201d The latter was not meant to target the Alitos, neighbor Emily Baden told Kantor, but Republicans in general.<\/p>\n
Maybe. But the street on which both houses sit is a cul-de-sac, with the Baden home sitting closer to the entrance. To get to their home several houses up the block, the Alitos would have had to drive by. One can see how the Alitos might have felt targeted.<\/p>\n
But this raises another issue. If the flag was intended to serve as a rejoinder to the Badens, it would not be an effective one since there would be no reason for the Badens to drive further down their dead-end street. In fact, Emily Baden told Kantor that she never saw the flag at all.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, Alito sent a letter to Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) asserting that he saw no need to recuse himself from decisions related to Donald Trump\u2019s efforts to retain power after losing the 2020 election.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am confident,\u201d he wrote, \u201cthat 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 the events recounted above do not meet the applicable standard for recusal.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those recounted events centered on the flag \u2014 for which he offered no direct explanation.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy wife\u2019s reasons for flying the flag are not relevant for present purposes,\u201d he wrote in the letter, \u201cbut I note that she was greatly distressed at the time due, in large part, to a very nasty neighborhood dispute in which I had no involvement.\u201d Among other elements, he wrote, the dispute involved a man using \u201cthe vilest epithet that can be addressed to a woman\u201d in addressing his wife.<\/p>\n
The Times reports that this exchange occurred not before the inauguration \u2014 explaining why the flag was seen outside of his house at that point \u2014 but instead in mid-February. This version of events, relayed by Emily Baden, was corroborated by a call she placed to police.<\/p>\n
There had been more than one encounter with the Badens before Barnes\u2019s arrival, though, according to that report. One was the day after the Capitol riot, on Jan. 7 \u2014 10 days before the flag was photographed outside the Alito household. The Alitos and Badens also confronted one another at some point on Jan. 20 before Barnes\u2019s visit \u2014 an encounter that would have been top of mind when Barnes asked Alito whether the flag bore any political meaning.<\/p>\n
In his letter, Alito again insisted that he had nothing to do with the flag.<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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,\u201d he wrote. He described this effort in strikingly legalistic terms: Since she is co-owner of the house, he continued, his wife \u201ctherefore has the legal right to use the property as she sees fit, and there were no additional steps that I could have taken to have the flag taken down more promptly.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is a striking claim: that he apparently believed the flag should be taken down but that his efforts to effect that happening were stymied by Martha-Ann Alito\u2019s property rights. You will also note that his letter doesn\u2019t suggest that the flag was a response to the Badens but, instead, that it coincidentally flew at a time when his wife was \u201cgreatly distressed\u201d by her neighbors.<\/p>\n
The reason the flag flew is \u201cnot relevant for present purposes,\u201d he asserts \u2014 though the purpose of the letter was to establish that the flag was not an indication of his views of Trump\u2019s efforts to retain power.<\/p>\n
What we are left with is that Alito didn\u2019t put the flag up but didn\u2019t do much to take it down. It flew some days after an encounter with their neighbors, albeit not the ones that involved the most vitriol. And if it was intended as a signal to those neighbors, it was one that they almost certainly would not have seen.<\/p>\n
We also know that Alito\u2019s concern about the coronavirus was too significant to allow him to participate in Biden\u2019s inauguration but not significant enough to keep him at home when The Post\u2019s reporter showed up that day. And we know that, in Alito\u2019s estimation, none of this should cause any objective observer to have any questions about his views of the former or the current president.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.\u2019s reason for skipping Joe Biden\u2019s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021, was presented by the court\u2019s spokeswoman: Several justices, presumably including Alito, \u201celected not to attend the inauguration ceremony in light of the public health risks posed by the COVID pandemic.\u201d So where were Alito and his wife headed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5006,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5005\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}