Emily Baden: It’s Been One Year Since the American People Learned What I Knew About Justice Samuel Alito
By Emily Baden
On January 20, 2025, the United States witnessed a historical inauguration. A convicted felon who is also a twice-impeached, adjudicated rapist stood before the nation and swore the Presidential oath of office.
So, how did we get here? Well, that story starts, in part, on inauguration day four years prior.
On Inauguration Day, 2021, a Washington Post reporter visited the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. The reporter came to follow up on an anonymous tip he’d received from a neighbor: that an upside-down American flag was displayed at Alito’s home. Alito and his wife were home at the time – given that the flag symbolized election denial, one can safely assume why they chose not to attend President Biden’s ceremony – and the reporter was met with extreme hostility. Somehow, however, the reporter decided that none of this was newsworthy. The public didn’t hear about any of this until exactly one year ago, when Jodi Kantor at the NYT broke this bombshell story in 2024.
And my role in all this? I was the neighbor who, according to Justice Alito, prompted him to fly the flag in response to our dispute. And I became keenly aware that the American public had to wait years to know the full story.
Eleven days before the flag was photographed at Alito’s house, former President Trump incited a deadly insurrection that resulted in hundreds of injuries, including several police officers who later died. Insurrectionists constructed a guillotine with the intention of hanging Mike Pence, which anonymous White House insiders said that Trump supported. It was an unprecedented attack on our democracy, and one of the symbols used by the rioters was the same upside-down American flag that a Supreme Court justice displayed at his home.
There is, of course, no evidence suggesting election fraud in 2020, but many prominent conservatives still peddle the Big Lie. Trump himself has never conceded. 2020 election denialism is a core belief of far-right conservatives, and it’s safe to say Alito fits right into that, even before one knows about his flag.
Alito describes himself as a practical originalist, but legal experts strongly disagree. He is a complete Republican partisan and will vote for whatever the GOP desires in that moment, regardless of legal precedent or constitutionality. He has also taken bribes from wealthy GOP donors with business before the court.
Clearly, a code of ethics for the Supreme Court is long overdue. After the flag story broke last year, there were demands from all sides for a way to prevent future violations of the American people’s trust. Multiple polls show that the vast majority of American people support Supreme Court reform as well. Some Republicans have agreed that a code of ethics for the court would be a good thing, but when they had the opportunity, they rejected it, claiming a code of ethics would undermine the court. Let’s be clear; the only people who oppose a code of ethics are those who benefit from the court acting unethically.
As of now, a few key members of Congress have taken direct action to restore trust in the court. Sen. Dick Durbin and other Senate Democrats have been demanding accountability from the court for more than a decade. They introduced the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act in 2023, and re-introduced it in the last few weeks. It is neither partisan nor controversial to expect that justices representing the highest court abide by basic guidelines of ethics, accountability, and transparency. Everyone should agree that the highest court in the land should not have the lowest ethical standards.
By letting this slide, our government has sent a message: we are all perfectly okay with a Supreme Court justice who is openly partisan and behaves as if he is invincible. Less than two weeks after January 6th, while the country was still reeling from a horrific coup attempt by our fellow citizens, Alito decided to send a deafening dog whistle to Trump allies everywhere: I’m with him.
Last year, two months after the flag story broke, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Trump’s immunity case. All six conservative judges dealt a death knell to our democracy, giving Trump complete immunity for any “official” act, which apparently includes inciting an insurrection, falsifying business documents, or stealing and concealing classified documents.
In the aftermath, we are left with a president who says, “I don’t know” when asked whether he has to abide by the Constitution. We have a president who issues unconstitutional executive orders and then threatens retaliation against lower court judges who try to stop him. He threatens to suspend centuries-old legal protections like Habeas Corpus and deny due process to American citizens, promising to send them to prisons abroad for exercising their First Amendment rights. He fires federal employees without cause and fills the Department of Justice with loyalists and 2020 election deniers. He aligns himself with white supremacists and Neo-Nazis. He has made education and the free press his mortal enemies. By any measure, he is a domestic enemy of the Constitution.
It’s possible none of this would have happened if the court had a way to ensure that judges uphold their ethical standards, such as being forced to recuse themselves if they have a conflict of interest. The consequences of the lack of decisive action against Alito’s treason are, of course, unknown. But judging by the fact that the vast majority of Americans support court accountability, it would have been far more significant for the public to learn of Alito’s upside-down flag when it actually happened, rather than three years later.
The good news is that there is still time. We all have the ability to take action in our own small ways and do everything we possibly can to protect democracy.
Emily Baden is an activist, proud union member, and mother. She lives in San Francisco and creates pro-democracy political content on TikTok.
