MAGAlito & the Missus

The upside-down "Stop the Steal" flag incident reminds us that Justice Alito allegedly had a critical role to play in the January 6 coup plot. Was he aware of it?

The confirmation hearing began amicably enough, despite the high stakes, and the palpable tension on both sides.

“The fact that he is such a baseball fan gives me even more confidence that he knows the proper role of a judge,” one of the GOP Senators declared in his opening statement. “I know that there is a pitched battle going on outside the Senate, with dueling press conferences, television ads, e-mail, petition drives, and stacks of reports and press releases. The Senate can rise above that battle if we remember the proper role for the Senate and the proper role for judges. We can rise above that battle if we respect that judicial nominees are limited in what they may discuss.”

A few days later, and the Senate Republicans are on their heels. The president, one of their number, has appointed a reactionary hardliner to the bench—a Catholic extremist and Leonard Leo acolyte whose contempt for Roe is well known—and after what has been a contentious confirmation hearing, the Democrats smell blood in the water. They have found a weakness, a legitimate way to attack the nominee’s character, judgment, and integrity.

Lindsey Graham can sense what’s happening. The gentleman from South Carolina realizes the GOP is in danger of their precious candidate being Bork’d. So he takes action. He doesn’t sidestep the issue. He meets it head on. He asks a loaded question designed to elicit an emotional response—in the nominee, but also in people watching on C-SPAN. He is indignant, as Lindsey Graham can be. The subtext is, “How dare they suggest that you, sir, are not a man of outstanding integrity and strong moral character!”

From her seat in the front row, the nominee’s wife springs to her feet. Tears are streaming down her cheeks as she hurries out of the room, momentarily diverting attention to her, the nominee’s loyal helpmate. The subtext is, “Those mean Democrats have made this poor woman cry!”

The next day, her dramatic exit from Room 216—and, critically, not the nominee’s suspect character—is the prevailing news story. (Less remarked upon is that this outburst happened just before lunch, and that the weepy wife returned after recess, smiling broadly, holding hands with her husband, as if nothing ever happened.)

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While there are any number of similarities between the aforementioned scene and the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing—Catholic extremism, anti-Roe sentiment, Leonard Leo’s fingerprints, confirmation hearing going off the rails, Lindsey Graham having a hissy-fit, the press being played—what I have just described happened in January of 2006, at the confirmation hearing of Samuel Anthony Alito, Jr.

“It’s a throwback, but men tend to get all rubbery when a woman cries. With tears, a woman is transported to the land-beyond-reproach,” Libby Copeland of NBC News astutely remarked, seeing through the bullshit. The nominee’s wife “sniffles and steps out of the hearing room after her husband, Samuel Alito, has been interrogated by Democrats, and the next thing you know, the ‘Today’ show is asking: ‘DEMOCRATS GONE TOO FAR?.”

It’s almost like there’s a playbook for this kind of thing.

(Sidenote: In 2006, there were two derogatory nicknames for the newly-minted Justice floating around the Beltway ether: Scalito, because Alito was basically Lil Antonin Scalia; and—on account of his dissent in Doe v. Groody, where he argued that it was totally legal and totally cool when some cops strip-searched a woman and her 10-year-old daughter—Strip-Search Sammy. Given the Justice’s penchant for stripping away rights, I move that the latter moniker be revived.)

The woman who left the chamber in tears—and who thus singlehandedly changed the narrative to help her flailing husband, whom Democrats were beating up because of his stated membership in a Princeton alumni group that opposed the university’s decision to admit women—was Martha-Ann Alito.

Yes, Dear Reader, this is the same Martha-Ann Alito who hung an American flag upside-down in front of her house in the days after January 6, 2021, in what couldn’t not have been, in Alito’s Fox News’d household, an overt gesture of sympathy for the insurrectionists. As Jodi Kantor explains in her New York Times exclusive:

During Mr. Trump’s quest to win, and then subvert, the 2020 election, the gesture took off as never before, becoming “really established as a symbol of the ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign,” according to Alex Newhouse, a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder.

A flood of social media posts exhorted Trump supporters to flip over their flags or purchase new ones to display upside down.

“If Jan. 6 rolls around and Biden is confirmed by the Electoral College our nation is in distress!!” a poster wrote on Patriots.win, a forum for Trump supporters, garnering over a thousand “up” votes. “If you cannot go to the DC rally then you must do your duty and show your support for our president by flying the flag upside down!!!!”

Local newspapers from Lexington, Ky., to Sun City, Ariz., to North Jersey wrote about the flags cropping up nearby. A few days before the inauguration, a Senate candidate in Minnesota flew an upside-down flag on his campaign vehicle.

Hanging an inverted flag outside a home was “an explicit signifier that you are part of this community that believes America has been taken and needs to be taken back,” Mr. Newhouse said.

Flying that flag, at that moment, is no different, fundamentally, than a federal judge in a Union state displaying the Stars & Bars a few days after the Battle of Bull Run. Which is probably why Justice Alito gallantly blamed the missus for hoisting the upside-down flag, telling the New York Times in an email, “I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag. It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

Spouses of public figures are not, and should not be considered, extensions of said public figures. Every individual has agency. I don’t think Hillary Clinton, for example, should be blamed for the trespasses of her husband, and I therefore understand the stated rationale behind the decision of the Washington Post to sit on the story for three years:

The Post decided not to report on the episode at the time because the flag-raising appeared to be the work of Martha-Ann Alito, rather than the justice, and connected to a dispute with her neighbors, a Post spokeswoman said. It was not clear then that the argument was rooted in politics, the spokeswoman said.

The thing is, the argument was about politics. And that should have been “clear” to any objective observer, and certainly to a fucking Beltway journalist, especially “then,” when the National Guard was bivouacked on Capitol Hill. Mrs. Alito was reportedly miffed that one of her neighbors displayed a FUCK TRUMP lawn sign—again, this was a few days after Donald tried to overthrow the government—and hung the upside-down flag in response. Was she doing that as a symbol of distress, as she subsequently claimed? Or was this the wife of a sitting Supreme Court Justice outing herself as a “Stop the Steal” supporter? You know, like the wife of another sitting Supreme Court Justice—Alito’s kindred spirit Clarence Thomas—outed herself as a “Stop the Steal” supporter in text messages to the White House Chief of Staff.

That upside-down flag was the second plane hitting the World Trade Center. It meant that it was no longer possible to deny an ugly reality—in this case, that two SCOTUS wives were in apparent league with the traitors. (Q. Would a non-traitor fly that flag a week after J6? A. Would a non-Nazi fly a Nazi flag?) And if Martha-Ann Alito sides with the insurrectionists, her Concerned Princeton Alumni husband likely harbors similarly seditious sympathies, despite whatever condescending cover story he feeds to the press.

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The “Stop the Steal” banner yet waving o’er the Alito household compels us to re-examine another, more consequential connection Strip-Search Sammy might have to the coup plotters. According to Sidney Powell, the former federal prosecutor indicted for her integral part in attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Justice Alito was expected to play a pivotal role in the plot.

In a September 2021 interview on The Stew Peters Show, expunged from YouTube but preserved for posterity by another former federal prosecutor, Ron Filipkowski, Powell explains that as MAGA insurrectionists were besieging the Capitol, her team was instigating a “12th Amendment constitutional challenge to the process the Congress was about to use.” This involved “suing the Vice President to follow the 12th Amendment as opposed to the Electoral College Act,” she told Peters. And then she offered a curious detail that becomes infinitely curiouser after last week’s flag imbroglio: “Justice Alito was our circuit justice for that.”

By the day of the insurrection attempt, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R—Moron) had already sued Pence, using the same fatuous argument, only to have the lawsuit thrown out by a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas. That didn’t stop Powell & Co. from trying to sue again—on January 6, 2021.

The plan, best as I can tell, was for Trump’s MAGA loyalists to stall the vote certification long enough for Justice Alito to put a stop to it. In the interview, Filipkowski tweeted, Powell “suggests that the purpose of the insurrection was to DELAY the electoral college certification to give Alito time to intervene on this legal challenge. But, Powell says they didn’t anticipate Pelosi reconvening Congress that day”—January 6.

“Everything broke loose,” Powell groused to Peters, “and [Pelosi] really had to speed up reconvening Congress to get the vote going before Justice Alito might have issued an injunction to stop it all— which is what should have happened.” That’s the seditionist equivalent of “And we would have gotten away it, if it weren’t for you meddling kids!”

For sure, Powell is not the sanest or most sober source. No argument there; we’ve all seen her sweaters. With that caveat, here are the facts: We know there was a MAGA plot to overturn the results of the election. We know she was an essential player in said plot; she pleaded guilty in Georgia for “six misdemeanors accusing her of conspiring to intentionally interfere with the performance of election duties.” We know the plot involved scuppering the certification of the vote on January 6. We know Rudy Giuliani called—or, rather, thought he called— Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville that day, urging him to stall. We know Mike Pence was under enormous pressure to play ball, and we know that, because he didn’t, the MAGA besiegers wanted to hang him. I mean, there had to be some reason the coup plotters were so hellbent on delaying the proceeding, right? Why would it not be what Powell explicitly said it was: to give Alito the requisite time to halt the electoral vote certification—and with it, the peaceful transfer of power?

Sidney Powell, of course, is a total loon. But, if her behavior with regard to the upside-down flag and her neighbors is any indication, so is Martha-Ann Alito. That is not reassuring.

Justice Alito was our circuit justice for that.

This raises a number of questions:

• Was what Powell described the actual coup plot, or was she just making shit up on the show?

• Would the MAGA plotters have gone through with the coup attempt if, say, Elena Kagan were the circuit justice?

• Did Alito know about any of this in advance, or were they just assuming, based on his MAGA-friendly personal beliefs, that he would roll with it?

• What is the nature of the relationship between Martha-Ann Alito and Ginni Thomas?

• Why were Powell & Co. so confident that Alito would issue an injunction?

• Was Alito aware of Gohmert’s previous lawsuit, and the argument laid out therein?

• Where does Alito, cherry picker ne plus ultra to secure desired outcomes, stand on the 12th Amendment v. Electoral College Act debate?

And, most ominously:

• If Alito had put a stop to the certification. . .would the plan have worked? And if so, what can Congress do to safeguard the process going forward?

This is the kind of thing that journalists—and, if Dick Durban gets off his keister, the Senate Judiciary Committee—should inquire of Justice Alito.

To be clear: I’m not accusing Alito of anything. Most likely, he knew nothing about the coup plot and is blameless. But if one of our nine Supreme Court Justices is a traitor, it goes without saying that the American people have the right, and the need, to know. And the only way to know is to ask. Pepper the smug guy with uncomfortable questions, preferably under oath, until the only flag displayed by Strip-Search Sammy and his missus is a white one.

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Photo credit: Scooby Doo!