The word disingenuous is not in the Constitution

Neither are the words “Samuel Alito,” although it is getting harder and harder to keep that in mind as the Justice From Jesus continues to assert his originalist ownership of our nation’s founding document.  We are speaking here, naturally, of Alito’s latest foray into the public realm:  his letter to Democratic leaders of the Senate refusing to recuse himself from Supreme Court cases involving the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. 

In the letter, Alito engages the recent controversy concerning the flying of two flags over his family’s properties in Virginia and New Jersey – the upside-down American flag flown in January of 2021 shortly after the insurrection took place, and an “Appeal to Heaven” flag flown at his family’s vacation home on the New Jersey shore.  Both flags were carried by Trump-loving insurrectionists at the Capitol on Jan. 6.  Images of both flags appeared in television coverage of the attack on the Capitol that day and in news photographs published after the attack.

The Alito letter, line by line, is a tower of disingenuousness.  The first thing he does is quote from the newly adopted Supreme Court code of ethics paragraph on disqualification, which states that a justice should recuse whenever his or her “impartiality might reasonably be questioned, that is, where an unbiased and reasonable person who is aware of all relevant circumstances would doubt that the Justice could fairly discharge his or her duties.”  He then proceeds to strip the language of the so-called “code” of any meaning its words attempted to hold, first by laying the blame for both of the flags at the feet of his wife, and second, by attempting to absolve her of seeking to convey any sort of political message.  He does so by asserting that in regard to the “Appeal to Heaven” flag that he was not “aware of any connection between this historic flag and the ‘Stop the Steal movement,’ and neither was my wife.” 

Conveniently, he completely omits addressing the connections between the upside-down American flag and the “Stop the Steal movement,” an omission so obvious that it strains credulity that it wasn’t intended. 

But having attempted to remove the flags themselves and the act of flying them from any sort of political message, Alito tells the Senators that “my wife’s reasons for flying the flag are not relevant for present purposes.”  The conditional phrase in the so-called code of ethics, that the test for a justice’s impartiality rests on conclusions that might be drawn by “an unbiased and reasonable person who is aware of all relevant circumstances,” loses its meaning with Alito’s declaration that his wife’s reasons for flying the flags are “not relevant.”

Well, are they, or aren’t they?  Alito certainly seems to think his wife’s reasons were “relevant” when he attributes his wife’s flying of the upside-down American flag to a “nasty neighborhood dispute in which I had no involvement.”  

According to an investigation published by the New York Times, a young couple living down the street called the Fairfax County police to make a complaint of harassment against Martha-Ann Alito, the justice’s wife, who had yelled at one of the complainants about a political sign they had put in their yard.  The problem is, the “dispute” Alito uses as the reason his wife flew the flag in mid-January took place a month later when the young couple called the cops.

Nasty things, facts.  When they are revealed, facts have this annoying tendency to alter or even cancel the basis for the reasoning that depends on them.

The pinnacle of Alito’s arrogance and privilege arrives when after denying that he and his wife had any knowledge at all of the political use of the flags by insurrectionists, he states that his wife did not fly the flags “to associate herself with that or any other group,” which slips in direct  knowledge beforehand by both of the Alitos that there were, in fact, “groups” using the flags to make political statements.

See, that’s the problem with disingenuousness when it is deployed to make a case that really cannot be made.  Alito didn’t need all his bogus assertions and strained reasoning.  What his letter to Senators Durbin and Whitehouse really said was, “Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah. I’m a Supreme Court justice, and you’re not.  So there!”