Another day, another preposterous smear of a Supreme Court justice.
For years, the left has tried to intimidate the court, delegitimize its decisions and pressure conservative justices to recuse themselves from major cases.
Clarence Thomas has typically been the focus of these efforts, but in recent weeks the left has turned its attention to Samuel Alito.
The new round of attacks kicked off last week with a New York Times hit piece headlined “At Justice Alito’s House, a ‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol on Display.”
As it turned out, the story was about a three-year-old dispute between Martha-Ann Alito, the justice’s wife, and her neighbors in a Northern Virginia suburb.
Alito told the Times that he had “no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag” and that it was “briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”
The objectionable “F*** Trump” sign was reportedly put within 50 feet of where children would wait for the school bus.
After weeks of the left protesting the homes of Supreme Court justices, Mrs. Alito ran an inverted American flag up the flagpole outside the couple’s family home.
The underlying assertion of the piece, of course, was that Justice Alito was a rabid partisan unable to perform his Constitutional duty.
The only problem with this proposition is that there is no evidence to prove it.
For one thing, flying a flag upside down does not necessarily have anything to do with the “Stop the Steal” campaign in support of then-President Trump’s claims of election fraud.
It symbolizes distress and has been used by left and right for political protest.
But even if it was a political gesture regarding the 2020 presidential contest, Alito has no reason to recuse himself from any case.
It may have been imprudent of Alito’s wife to fly the flag, but spouses of justices are not justices.
They have First Amendment protections like anyone else.
Neither Mrs. Alito nor Mrs. Clarence Thomas nor Mr. Ketanji Brown Jackson is bound by Supreme Court ethical guidelines.
All of them are free to have their own opinions.
Moreover, by the time the Alito house displayed the distress flag, Donald Trump had already conceded the 2020 presidential race.
There’s no evidence Alito has ever diverged from his judicial philosophy to benefit himself or anyone else, traditionally the reason for any judicial recusal.
Then again, even if Alito himself had hoisted the distress flag to make a point, it still wouldn’t warrant recusal by the left’s own standards.
Justices often make political statements.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, still beloved by the left, was perhaps the most openly partisan justice in modern times.
In 2016, she told The New York Times that she could not even “imagine” what the country would look like with “Donald Trump as our president,” and not a single outlet demanded she recuse herself from any cases involving the then-president.
Now, as preposterous as the upside-down flag story was, things would only get dumber.
The newest ginned-up “ethical scandal” contends that Alito participated in the Bud Light boycott over the beer brand’s hiring of transgender social media “influencer” Dylan Mulvaney.
The purported scandal was given major billing across the media.
The justice’s crime? Selling between $1,000 and $15,000 in stock on Aug. 14, 2023 – which he noted in his own financial disclosures.
It should be noted that the boycott of Bud Light began in April of 2023.
By mid-August, the stock of Anheuser-Busch InBev, its parent company, was nearing its bottom and the boycott was petering out.
If anything, Alito dumped the stock too late.
Even if Alito had an ideological problem with the beer company, there is nothing prohibiting him from selling any stock for any reason he wishes.
Nothing in the code of ethics adopted by the Supreme Court in 2023 prohibits a justice from speaking out about non-legal issues.
Besides, Alito was privy only to information readily available to everyone in the world: AB InBev’s stock was tanking in August, so he dumped it.
The fact that Alito bought Molson Coors stock within the same price range on the same date, we are assured, also proves that the buy was “boycott-related action.”
Again, so what?
It’s quite possible that Alito thought the prospects of Molson Coors were better.
Not that it matters to Democrats and the media, who keep inventing new standards and concocting imaginary ethical rules to delegitimize the court.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist.