- author, Mike Wendling
- role, BBC News
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U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has rejected calls to recuse himself from a key election-year case following a controversy over a flag in front of his home.
Conservative Justice Alito, in a letter to Democratic senators, said the flag in question had been flown by his wife.
He has been photographed with upside-down American flags and pine trees or “Appeal to Heaven” flags flying outside his suburban Virginia home and his vacation home in New Jersey.
Both bills were introduced following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, when supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the building.
Justice Alito said the case does not affect his impartiality in the case involving President Trump and the Capitol rioters.
“My wife likes to fly the flag,” he wrote in a letter to two senators who asked him to recuse himself from the high-profile case. “I don’t.”
Justice Alito noted that the upside-down U.S. flag, sometimes used to show hardship, was raised by his wife, Martha Ann Alito, following an argument with a neighbor in January 2021, shortly after the storming of the U.S. Capitol.
“As I have stated publicly, I had no role in raising that flag,” Justice Alito wrote.
“I didn’t even realize the upside-down flag existed until it was pointed out to me. As soon as I saw it, I asked my wife to take it down, but for several days she refused.”
Image source, Getty Images
The New York Times, which first reported on the upside-down flag, published a detailed story about the neighbors’ dispute on Tuesday.
According to the paper, a local couple had put up signs outside their home with messages such as “Trump is a fascist” and “You are an accomplice,” as well as other foul language about Mr Trump.
The couple and Alito have had numerous arguments, with Justice Alito telling Fox News that he and his wife were walking around their neighborhood when a man holding a Trump sign outside their home yelled obscenities at them.
Police were contacted at some point, the paper said, but no crime was recorded and no arrests were made.
Justice Alito wrote in his letter Wednesday that his wife “was extremely distressed at the time due to a very nasty neighborhood dispute in which I had no involvement whatsoever.”
The “Appeal to Heaven” flag appeared outside Alito’s vacation home more than two years later, in 2023. The justice said it was one of many historical, thematic and sports team flags that his wife had flown outside the home.
Ted Kaye, executive director of the North American Flag and Emblem Society, said the pine tree flag dates back to the American Revolutionary War and was flown on ships outfitted by George Washington.
“It’s a respected Revolutionary War flag,” the flag expert said, and the pine tree itself has long been considered a symbol of New England.
But starting around 2015, the Appeal to Heaven flag “was repurposed to represent Christian nationalism,” Kaye said. He was referring to a right-wing Christian movement often defined as the belief that American values and identity should be rooted in Christianity.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson hung a pine tree flag outside his office. Local media reported that the flag had also flown as part of a flag display in a San Francisco plaza before being removed by city officials over the weekend.
According to the U.S. Flag Code, a set of recommended rules for flying the flag, the U.S. flag should only be flown upside down when there is “extreme danger to life or property.”
Image source, Getty Images
Image source, Getty Images
After the flag issue emerged, Senators Richard Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse (both Democrats) wrote Justice Alito urging him to recuse himself from important cases the Supreme Court was scheduled to decide.
The cases include important rulings on whether Trump enjoys immunity from prosecution and whether criminal charges of obstruction of justice were properly applied in the Capitol attack.
The senators said the judge “raised reasonable doubts about his impartiality” and that “his recusal in these matters is necessary and required.”
But Justice Alito, who was appointed in 2006 by Republican President George W. Bush, said in his response that the two cases “do not meet the applicable challenge standard.”
A clause in the U.S. Constitution allows judges to “disqualify themselves from any case in which their impartiality may be called into question,” a decision left to the Supreme Court justices themselves.
