THE VERDICT IS IN ON THE SUPREME COURT
Maureen Dowd
After Donald Trump was found guilty of
34 felony counts in a Manhattan court, conservatives — from Marjorie Taylor
Greene to George Santos to the Heritage Foundation — began posting upside-down
American flags on X in solidarity with the “political prisoner,” as Trump
absurdly styles himself.
It was the same upside-down symbol
that insurrectionists carried to the Capitol on Jan. 6 to proclaim that they
thought the election was stolen and that was seen flying over Justice Samuel
Alito’s house in suburban Virginia even as the Supreme Court was considering
whether to hear a case about the 2020 presidential election.
Now that it’s being used to show
support for a felonious ex-president, Alito will have an even harder time
trying to pretend he’s oblivious about its meaning.
I don’t need a black robe to hand down
a judgment on the Supreme Court.
It’s corrupt, rotten and hurting America.
The once august court, which the
public held in highest esteem, is now hopelessly corroded: It is in the hands
of a cabal of religious and far-right zealots, including a couple of ethical
scofflaws with MAGA wives.
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Chief Justice John Roberts, who
dreamed of being remembered as a great unifier of the court, is refusing to
rein in Justices Alito and Clarence Thomas, who are thumbing their noses at the
public and their own oaths to dispense fair and impartial justice.
When Alito pushed a willing
conservative majority into yanking away women’s right to control their own
bodies, he was, in essence, blaming women: You get pregnant, you’ll have to
live with it.
In this latest firestorm, he blamed
one woman in particular: his wife, Martha-Ann.
Somehow, in Alito’s world, women are
to blame.
It was shocking when The Times’s Jodi
Kantor reported that the
upside-down flag cherished by “Stop the Steal” marchers was hanging outside
Alito’s house. It was even more shocking when we learned that another flag
carried by “Stop the Steal” rioters on Jan. 6, the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, was
flying outside the Alitos’ vacation home in New Jersey as cases concerning the
Jan. 6 assault and riot were pending at the court. This flag symbolizes support
for Donald Trump and a desire to infuse the federal government with a lot more
Christianity.
“In coming weeks, the justices will
rule on two climactic cases involving the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6,
including whether Mr. Trump has immunity for his actions,” Ms. Kantor wrote.
“Their decisions will shape how accountable he can be held for trying to
overturn the last presidential election and his chances for re-election in the
upcoming one.”
Alito’s conservative Christian,
right-wing, deeply aggrieved views about the culture wars are reflected in his
speeches, decisions and now flags that are red flags.
He is refusing to recuse himself from
the two cases about the attempted coup on Jan. 6. (One concerns the question of
whether Mr. Trump is immune from prosecution for his role egging on rioters;
the other involves a federal obstruction law used to charge the rioters.)
When leading Democratic lawmakers
demanded Alito’s recusal, he wrote back, trying to make Martha-Ann Alito the
fall guy. Alito has clearly heard enough criminal appeals to know you’ve got to
point the finger at somebody else when you’re guilty.
“My wife is fond of flying flags,” he wrote to the lawmakers.
“I am not. She was solely responsible for having flagpoles put up at our
residence and our vacation home and has flown a wide variety of flags over the
years.”
He’s happy to take away the rights of
millions of American women to control their bodies, but respects the right of
his wife to control their incendiary flags. While he’s on the Supreme Court, he
said, Martha-Ann wields the gavel at home.
“I was not even aware of the
upside-down flag until it was called to my attention,” he wrote. “As soon as I
saw it, I asked my wife to take it down, but for several days, she refused.” He
said there was absolutely nothing he could do to get that pesky seditious flag
taken down sooner.
He was oblivious about the symbolism
of the “Appeal to Heaven” Pine Tree Flag, he claimed.
Clarence Thomas is also awash in
ethical snarls, some related to his wife. Ginni Thomas’s supporters also tried
to defend her activism related to Jan. 6 by saying she is an independent
spouse.
But it doesn’t wash. As Jane Mayer wrote in The New Yorker,
Ms. Thomas is a lawyer and a prominent member of hard-right groups and “has
declared that America is in existential danger because of the ‘deep state’ and
the ‘fascist left,’ which includes ‘transsexual fascists.’”
In a Facebook post, she linked to a
news item about the Jan. 6 protest and wrote “LOVE MAGA people!!!!”
Mayer noted that it is getting harder
to dismiss Ginni Thomas’s actions as harmless, given that the “Supreme Court
appears likely to secure victories for her allies in a number of highly
polarizing cases — on abortion, affirmative action, and gun rights.”
Senator Richard Blumenthal asked
Roberts to make Justice Thomas recuse himself from the case on Trump and the
insurrection, but Thomas refused.
The Supreme Court has two decisions on
abortion cases due any day.
“The Fall of Roe,” an insightful new
book by the New York Times reporters Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer, laid out
the events and the strategy — and the failure of the Democrats to recognize the
threat — that led to the fall of Roe. There was a determined group of religious
zealots with a long-term master plan to pack the court with religious zealots.
“These conservative Catholic and
evangelical Christian operators believed they were fighting the biggest moral
battle of the modern age, and forced America to debate on their terms,” they
wrote. “But despite their public appeals, they did not convince broad swaths of
Americans of the righteousness of their cause. Instead, they remained a
minority, and leveraged the structures of American democracy in their favor,
building a framework strong enough to withstand not only the political system
but also a society moving rapidly against them. They took power to remake the
nation in their image. And they were far more organized than their opponents or
the public ever knew.”
Now it’s up to Democrats to turn the
tables and see if they can use this issue in the November election to save the
country and women’s rights.