2024-06-07 00:25:50
Every Friday, Guardian columnist and former Washington correspondent, Jonathan Freedland, invites experts to help analyse the latest in American politics. From politicians to journalists covering the White House and beyond, Jonathan and his guests give listeners behind the scenes access to how the American political machine works.
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I'm Archie Bland, editor of The Guardian's Election Edition newsletter. Every weekday evening, I'll be guiding you through the twists and turns of the campaign in an extra election episode of Today in Focus. So listen, subscribe to Today in Focus wherever you get your podcasts, and don't worry, all of this will be over in a month.
A few weeks back, reports surfaced that the Supreme Court Justice, Samuel Alito, had once flown an upside-down American flag outside his house.
An upside-down flag is meant to signal distress and has been used as a sign of protest by both the left and right.
The problem with this particular upside-down flag was timing.
This was the photo taken on January 17th, 2021.
. The upside-down flag was a symbol associated with former President Trump's false claims of election fraud.
So far, Justice Alito is refusing to recuse himself from all cases that involve January 6th. So, as America prepares for a number of Supreme Court rulings to be handed down this month, is this further proof that the highest court in the land has an ethics and bias problem? I'm Jonathan Friedland, columnist at The Guardian, and this is Politics Weekly America.
So he was appointed by George W. Bush during the Bush administration.
Amanda Marcotte is a senior writer for the Salon website. She writes their twice-weekly politics newsletter, Standing Room Only.
And even back then, his appointment was very controversial. Judge Alito is one of the most accomplished and respected judges in America.
And his long career in public service has given him an extraordinary breadth of experience. He had been the justice on an appeals court who wrote an opinion on Planned Parenthood versus Casey, saying that women who get abortions should have to get their husband's permission first. When his confirmation hearing happened, he and his wife threw a bunch of fits because it was brought up that he had been a member of Concerned Alumni for Princeton, which was a group organized in the 70s and 80s to oppose racial diversity at Princeton and women's admissions. And so he has a long history of really retrograde opinions on whether women have rights, whether people of color should be included in regular, powerful politics, and even allowed to go to, like Ivy League schools.
That gives us a very good sense of him, the man, and obviously came to a lot of people's attention when the Dobbs ruling overturning Roe v. Wade was made public.
In a highly, indeed, as far as I can tell, utterly unprecedented leak from the Supreme Court, Politico has obtained what they say is an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Alito, showing the Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade.
So we know he's conservative, but let's get to this thing. that's put him in the newspapers. It surfaced in a New York Times report in May that they talked to some of his neighbors about this flag. So just tell us what we know about the flag and what its meaning is.
Yeah, so he and his wife, well, he blames. his wife, got into arguments with the neighbors over January 6, over the neighbors putting out signs, basically saying they disagreed with Trump, trying to, you know, overturn an election.
According to the Times, a neighbor said the flag was there for several days and that Alito's.
wife, Martha Ann, was in dispute with another homeowner who displayed an anti-Trump sign with an expletive, which offended Martha Ann Alito. The Alito household had a flag out front of it. that was the upside down American flag, which is traditionally used as a symbol of distress, but had been adopted by pro-coup forces and January 6 people to sort of signal support for overthrowing the election. So the whole idea is the country's in distress, we're entitled to end democracy, to sort of quote, unquote, save it, even though what are you saving if you destroy democracy, right? And so, by hanging the upside down flag outside of their house, the Alitos were functionally signaling support for January 6, the insurrection, and, you know, the overall anti-democratic politics that it represented.
And there is a history to flying the American flag upside down in America. Some anti-war protesters going back against the Iraq war, against the Vietnam war, would do that. It was associated with the left, but it now has this link to the almost the insurrectionist right. And at first there was this claim by Alito that it was about a very specific dispute with, you know, a specific set of neighbors in their home in Washington. But this other twist has come where you've got to believe.
that scenario then played itself out again at a different Alito residence.
Yeah. I mean, he hung at their vacation home. Again, he blames his wife. So that's the official story. There was an appeal to heaven flag hanging out in front of their vacation home.
You can see the white and green appeal to heaven flag amid the rioters who surged into the Capitol January 6.
The siege helped make the flag a symbol of support for former President Trump and the.
conservative Christian nationalist movement.
In a lot of ways, this is even more alarming, in part because they don't have the excuse of them fighting with the neighbors, but also the appeal to heaven flag is like a deep cut because it's a new apostle flag. That's kind of who it's most associated with, which is this Protestant group of Christian nationalists who believe that secular American democracy needs to be replaced with Christian theocracy, basically.
And the point about the flag is it was carried by some of the people who stormed the Capitol in January 2021.
. So it's right in there. I mean, deep cut is the right way of putting it, but it's in the inner circles of the insurrectionists. This is an image they use.
Yeah. And the people that carry that flag, it tells you a lot about the notion that the MAGA movement somehow just believed that the election was stolen, and that's why they felt the need to storm the Capitol. I don't think that's entirely true. I think that waving the appeal to heaven flag shows that the real agenda of the insurrectionists was. they did understand on some level that this was an attempt to overthrow an election that they just didn't like the outcome.
And the reason they don't like the outcome is because they believe in Christian theocracy and they want to replace democracy with Christian theocracy. It is a little interesting that the Alitos, who are Catholic, are backing this, but I think there is a tendency on the far right to ignore the fact that there are theological disputes over what a Christian nationalist theocracy would look like, because they're so focused on hating liberals and secularists, and atheists and Jews and Muslims and everyone who's not quote unquote Christian that they are kind of setting aside their differences right now.
So, yes, it's almost heartwarming unity that they're opting for. So that's the position. He says it's his wife who put up these flags, you know, in a neighbor dispute. in the first case. You don't really have that excuse in the second.
Obviously, this matters anyway. A Supreme Court judge expressing his views, as you explain, in a way they're almost like sort of royal figures in America, where they're meant to be completely above the frame. No one's meant to know what they think, but any so. any departure from that is always news when occasionally they do express an opinion. But it has particular relevance, and one might even say urgent relevance.
right now. Just explain why that is given the court and what they've got to decide.
They have a number of cases related to the attempted coup and the January 6th insurrection in particular that they're looking at. Justices will consider if the Department of Justice went too far when it prosecuted hundreds of rioters on charges of obstruction of an official proceeding. Some of them involve whether or not the people that stormed the Capitol on January 6th should be prosecuted the way that they have been. And he, during the questioning, like the arguments in front of the court, used questions to sort of express views that suggested he was sympathetic to the January 6th insurrectionists.
Let's say that today, five people get up one after the other and they shout, either keep the January 6th insurrectionists in jail or free the January 6th patriots. And as a result of this, our police officers have to remove them forcibly from the courtroom. And let's say we have to, it delays the proceeding for five minutes. Would that be a violation of 1512c2??
And then there's another case where Donald Trump has been saying that he should be, he's arguing that he has blanket immunity from any kind of charges for crimes he committed while in office, including crimes involving attempting to overthrow an election.
Special counsel Jack Smith is arguing that Donald Trump has never been above the law. Trump's lawyers argue that what he did to try to overturn the election results was part of his official duties as president and he shouldn't be prosecuted.
And for him to be like flying flags, suggesting these opinions, it's more than a little alarming. We want our Supreme Court justices to generally believe in the Constitution. And unfortunately for me, I feel like a lot of the discourse about this has been focused on the like impropriety of a Supreme Court justice having a partisan point of view. This goes deeper than the fact that he's just like pro-Republican. This is like.
he just disagrees with basic precepts of the US Constitution and how our government is organized.
Which is obviously a huge problem, given the Supreme Court's job is to enforce the Constitution, and so is a judge who doesn't believe in the law. I mean, all of this is a huge deal, especially this month, as we get those final few decisions from the court before the summer break. I mean, the normal remedy in a situation like this would be recusal. when a judge who is conflicted in such a way and has an opinion that might prejudice a case, they recuse themselves. They step back from that case.
Alito wrote last week, though, to say, no chance. I'm not going to do that. Yes, Amanda, just set out for us the argument he made when he wrote this letter to Congress, saying he had no intention of stepping aside from any of those cases where this might be relevant.
He refuses to acknowledge that he has these opinions and that he expressed them publicly. He's blaming his wife. He's saying she's the one who did it all. Basically, you know, it's the dog. ate my homework.
excuse, except in this case, it's the wife flew the flag. excuse. The conservative justice said his wife was greatly distressed over a very nasty neighborhood dispute, noting she is a private citizen with full First Amendment rights.
And the wording is fantastic. It goes, as soon as I saw it, I asked my wife to take it down. But for several days she refused.
Yeah. And Sam Alito's entire public record is of a firm belief that women don't have very basic rights. They don't have a right to bodily autonomy. Again, when he was appeals court judge, he said women should have to get their husband's permission to get an abortion. And it's like if women are required to get their husband's permission for something so important and life changing, surely his wife has to obey him when he says you have to take that flag down.
Yeah. I mean, the surrendered wife movement suddenly goes very quiet at this point. But the and there is a precedent here, I mean, or, you know, almost a pattern, which is not so long ago. We were all talking about the views and associations of the wife of a different judge, Clarence Thomas.
Justice Thomas's wife, Ginny, backed efforts to overturn the 2020 election outcome, but has recently said she and her husband don't discuss their work with each other.
Well, let's talk about her, but also why nothing was done about that either.
So Ginny Thomas, Virginia Thomas, she has been a longtime Republican activist, which, in and of itself, is breaking decades and decades of Supreme Court tradition. And then, when Donald Trump started his coup, she was intimately involved. We have the January 6th committee in Congress found just piles and piles of text messages from her to Mark Meadows, who was the chief of staff at the White House. Ginny Thomas wrote to Mark Meadows, quote, Help this great president, stand firm, Mark. You are the leader with him who is standing for America's constitutional governance at the precipice.
The majority knows Biden and the left are attempting the greatest heist of our history. Basically throwing out ideas, like trying to sort of engage like different legal theories for how they could overthrow the election. At the end of the day, they decided that she wasn't influential enough within the coup to be like a major player. I think that a lot of what was going on with her was that she was speaking a lot, but not necessarily shaping the strategy that much. She was the person that just is a big, loud mouth that everyone's kind of ignoring.
That said, I think it's reasonable to be worried that somebody who was at the let's overthrow democracy meetings is married to a Supreme Court justice. And it's important to understand that Thomas has kind of played the same game where he says, oh, my wife and I, we don't talk about politics. That's just not part of our marriage. And yet they met because of politics. And in her text messages to Mark Meadows, she repeatedly, coyly references Clarence Thomas and his support of her political opinions within the text messages.
So, and indeed, the whole argument rests on there being some very unlikely wall of separation in the family household, which is a bit of a stretch, to put it mildly. It does go to this issue, which people have been raising, which is for a long time, the Supreme Court was almost one of the few institutions that didn't have any rules binding it. It was enforcing rules for everyone else. Last year, the court did agree to be bound by a set of ethics rules, but did crucially hold back from making them in any way enforceable. So this is an ongoing thing.
And it does mean there is a kind of impunity, I suppose, sort of above the law quality, about these nine people who have to themselves uphold the law.
Yeah. And when you kind of put those two things together, you can see how Alito and Thomas's ideology is sort of melding with the Supreme Court's refusal to hold themselves accountable at all to democratic systems. Like, what is the sort of underlying premise of Donald Trump's coup and the insurrection and things like the appeal to heaven flag and stuff like that? It's that there should be this far right leadership in the U.S. that is above democracy, that is above, like that is not accountable to the people, that is just ruling over the rest of us, whether we like it or not.
It's it's monarchical. Right. And I think, unfortunately, like because of a sort of fluke in our system, we have a court that has functionally turned itself into a kind of ad hoc monarchy that is able to sort of just overthrow any kind of democratically passed laws that can just do what they want. And we don't actually have a way to stop them.
And obviously, extremely good news for the man who would be president again, Donald Trump, to know that there is a court there that is on board for even some of his most extreme views. You've written that. all of this, though, moves beyond just the business of the court, that the notion of even just the imagery of these flags are part of a trend of what we would once have called conservatives. But we should really say the right toying with your words, fascist peekaboo, and how there is. there are a few examples of this, of mainstream Republicans flirting with using the language of fascism.
Can you give us a couple of examples of what's on your mind there?
I mean, Donald Trump, does it all the time. What was he? They put up a video the other day, right, that said, the unified Reich. Former President Trump, ignoring questions about a controversial video, posted to his truth social account Monday. It's since been deleted, but not before the Biden-Harris campaign posted a screengrab of it.
They use a red box to highlight the words unified Reich in what appears to be a Trump victory video. And then, when they were called out on it, pretended it was an accident.
And I mean, that's an amazing case, isn't it? Because it's the language of Nazism, the Third Reich and so on. And there they were using it about America.
Yeah, and this goes back all the way to the beginning of the first Trump administration. Trump supporters like the OK symbol. They called it. they would say that it was a white power symbol, like the. when you do the OK with your hands.
A lot of MAGA people would flash it in photos and stuff. And the point of that would be to get liberals all riled up saying, oh, they're doing white power symbols. And then they go, it's not white power. It's just the OK symbol. And I think that was really kind of laid the groundwork for what we're seeing now, which is a lot of accidental Nazi references.
You know, Trump saying poisoning the blood of immigrants are poisoning our blood. And then his campaign running in and denying that it means what it obviously means. And it's gaslighting. Right. I mean, this is kind of a very classic technique, which is to sort of drain words and symbols of all meaning so that they can signal what they want to with each other, while also claiming that their opponents are overreacting.
It does raise a question of what people can do about it. Our colleague Margaret Sullivan wrote that, you know, the media play a role here because they just absorb this as if it's normal stuff in a campaign. And yet if you do call it out, as you've said, then in a way you've played into their game, because they can say, look at all these hysterical liberals getting, you know, over, worried about things that they shouldn't be. I mean, what is the way to respond to this when this is all part of a very well documented lurch to the right?
Well, I think it helps to have a long memory. every time Trump says Hitler stuff or does Nazi stuff like, stop treating it like a one off occasion. He says it was an accident. He said unified. right.
OK, well, then, why was it in an accident when you said neo-Nazis that marched in Charlotte are very good people? Why was it also an accident when you, you know, said immigrants are poisoning the blood of our nation? Why was it an accident when you had a rally at Waco near the anniversary of the Waco fire there? Like, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Like bringing that history in, I think, can help people see that this is a pattern and not just an accident, that that's not a legitimate excuse.
Calmly bring in the evidence that this is not, in fact, just oopsies over and over and over again, that this is something that is a pattern, suggests purpose. And I think that that's really helpful here.
Yeah, I know we've got to the stage now where oopsies has become part of our political vocabulary. Amanda, as you know, because you've been here before, we do like to ask our guests a what else question, usually something completely different. In this case, we're going to be sticking with the law and with trials. after we got the verdict in that pretty important one in a Manhattan courtroom last week. Donald Trump convicted on all 34 counts against him.
But meanwhile, over in Delaware, another court case kicked off this week. The man in the dock is Hunter Biden.
In opening statements, prosecutors described Hunter Biden as a drug addict who lied on a federal form in order to buy a gun in 2018.
. The president's son is charged with three felonies related to that purchase when he was, according to his memoir, addicted to crack. Hunter has pleaded not guilty. And for a second day, first lady Jill Biden sat behind him in court.
What do you make of all this? And particularly, what do you think its political impact, if any, is going to be?
Donald Trump broke the law. He conspired against the United States. He conspired against the voters. And you're seeing Republicans just hair on fire running around defending this man. And I think what's interesting about this is that you're seeing no resistance from Joe Biden.
Nobody's defensive among Democrats. They're like, OK, well, we believe in rule of law. Like, so if Hunter Biden gets convicted, he gets convicted. It is what it is. You know, I was on Reddit and saw people discussing the case on a politics forum and literally everyone just kind of said the same thing, which is, is Hunter Biden running for office?
No, so I don't care. And I think that's kind of ultimately what this is going to come down to.
Yeah, I think I suspect that's right. The exception being those people whose minds are already made up. In other words, people who are dug in already, all in for Trump. Maybe this will be another mark against Biden, but they were already in that place anyway. And obviously people who are pro-Biden are going to view this case probably in the way you describe, which is just as a part of a vendetta.
Nevertheless, we will keep an eye on that and everything else if it brings any kind of political impact. For the moment, though, Amanda Markoff, thanks so much for joining me on Politics Weekly America.
Thanks for having me.
And that is all from me for this week. Now, if you want to follow all the twists and turns from the UK's general election campaign trail, do make sure to subscribe to our sister podcast, Today In Focus, as well as their brilliant daily episodes. They're bringing listeners an election update at the end of each weekday with Today In Focus producer Lucy Hoff and Guardian journalist Archie Bland. Just search for Today In Focus and hit subscribe. But for now, it's goodbye.
The producer is Danielle Stevens. The executive producer this week, Phil Maynard. I'm Jonathan Friedland. Thanks, as always, for listening.
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