Samuel Alito - A Threat to Democracy and Freedom

In addition to being a far right religious extremist who seeks to inflict his religious beliefs (which are share by other Republican zealots on the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Samuel Alito holds democracy in contempt and seemingly is fine with seeing the American system of democracy overthrown. The irony - although not so much if one has followed the :Christian" right for decades - is that Alito loves to wear his feigned piety and religiosity on his sleeve, lies are his stock in trade, including perjuring himself during his confirmation hearings, as did Gorsuch and Coney-Barrett.  No one lies more often and viciously than they self-anointed "godly folk.  Now Alito finds himself embroiled in his apparent support for the January 6th insurrectionist, although he has tried to throw his wife under the bus rather than admit his own open hostility to fair elections if his cult leader does not win (he also has contempt for non-whites voting and would be fine with a return to the Jim Crow era).   A piece in The Atlantic looks at Alito and the malevolent threat he poses to democracy and the religious freedoms of other Americans.  Here are excerpts: 

There may be an insurrectionist justice on the Supreme Court, perhaps two. The New York Times reported yesterday that 10 days after a violent mob ransacked the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election and keep Donald Trump in power, an upside-down American flag flew outside the home of Justice Samuel Alito. At the time, Trump supporters were using the upside-down flag as a symbol of their belief in Trump’s lies that the election had been stolen.

Trump knew those claims were false, and many conservative-media stars also knew those claims were false. Nevertheless, right-wing outlets like Fox News repeated those false claims, stirring hope among their audiences that the election outcome could be reversed by force or fraud. The conservatives who trusted those outlets clung to those beliefs, either earnestly or as an ideological expression of their more foundational belief that the constituencies of the rival party are illegitimate and their votes should not count.

Among those audiences appears to be the Alito household, which, according to the Times’ report, flew the upside-down flag for an unknown number of days, despite or because of the fact that “Trump’s supporters, including some brandishing the same symbol, had rioted at the Capitol a little over a week before.” Alito, for his part, as right-wing champions of family values are wont to do, blamed his wife.

“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” the right-wing justice told 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.” . . . Even accepting that this is true and that Alito’s neighbor was behaving rudely, signaling support for an insurrection is an odd way to respond to someone accusing you of supporting an insurrection.

Alito’s statement is notable because, as the Times reporter Michael Barbaro pointed out, it does not deny that the flag was flown in solidarity with the insurrectionists. It also does not disavow the insurrectionist claim that the 2020 election was stolen, and it does not condemn the Trump-directed attempt to overthrow the constitutional order that Alito has sworn an oath to uphold. Nor do the subsequent statements to Fox purporting to explain the flag’s presence. Alito is also not the only justice whose spouse seems to have supported Trump’s failed coup. The congressional investigation into the events of January 6 showed that Virginia Thomas, a conservative activist and the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, tried to persuade Arizona Republicans to overturn the result in their state.

That raises the most important issue here, which is that Alito and Thomas sit on the nation’s highest court and are poised to rule on matters related to Trump’s attempts to unlawfully hold on to power. In one case, they already have—deciding that the Constitution’s ban on insurrectionists holding office does not disqualify Trump from running for president. The Court is set to rule on a challenge to a federal law used to prosecute the January 6 rioters, and in another case about Trump’s claim that former presidents have “absolute immunity” to prosecution for crimes committed as “official acts” in office. The 6–3 right-wing majority has made its partisan lean unmistakable. But there is still a difference between an ideologically conservative, or even partisan, Court and one with sitting justices whose worldview is so deranged by fanaticism that they would prefer the end of constitutional government to a president from the rival party.

The most charitable interpretation of Alito’s non-disavowal of the upside-down flag and its meaning is that, because the Court has several forthcoming cases related to Trump’s actions, he wanted to avoid expressing an opinion beforehand. . . . The flaw in this defense is that Alito is as shy about sharing his political opinions as a street preacher is in predicting the apocalypse.

In 2020, Alito warned that liberals were a threat to free speech. In 2021, he attacked the media for correctly reporting that the Supreme Court had nullified the right to an abortion in Texas by upholding the state’s abortion-bounty law, and was poised to overturn that right in the rest of the country. In 2022, he mocked those who criticized his ahistorical ruling in the Dobbs case, which has led to a patchwork of laws that subject women to a gender-based regime of state force and surveillance. . . . And despite all of these public statements attacking the left, particularly on matters of free speech, Alito has amassed a jurisprudential record suggesting that his interpretation of the First Amendment confers a right to monologue on those who share his beliefs.

In general, Alito has little compassion for criminal defendants, having sided with defendants the least of all the sitting Supreme Court justices. But Alito suddenly became skeptical of the fairness of the criminal-justice system when the law used to prosecute the January 6 defendants came under review, worrying that it might be used against nonviolent protesters, prompting him to ask Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar if hecklers interrupting Supreme Court proceedings would be prosecutable under the same law.

[E]arlier this month, Alito joined his right-wing colleagues in ruling that police could continue to legally seize people’s property without charging them with a crime, so his interest in due process appears to be strikingly Trump-specific.

How Alito votes in these upcoming cases will inevitably be colored by this apparent embrace of Trump’s falsehoods about voter fraud, which led to the first and only attempt by a sitting president to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

One cannot say for certain that Alito has approached these matters the way he has because he supported Trump’s attempted coup. What we can say is that it is not unreasonable to ask whether a pro-insurrectionist justice sits on the nation’s highest court.

Alito poses a grave danger - he is an extremist and zealot who wants to force his views on all Americans and seemingly would support a dictatorship to accomplish that goal.