Justice Alito's Flags And What They Mean
aka, My Dog Ate My Homework
Last week we all read about Supreme Court Justice Samual Alito’s flags and his “I had nothing to do with it. My dog ate my homework!” defense.
I suspect that much of America on all sides - with the exception of the MAGA Third Rail political party - found his (or his dog’s) actions inappropriate and unpatriotic. Big issues, especially for a Supreme Court Justice. But the judge’s flying of those flags was more than simply inappropriate and unpatriotic. The MAGA party is inappropriate and unpatriotic every day. But the judge’s actions go to the core of America’s most destructive, ever-lasting, and most insurmountable problem. Let’s bear in mind that with every case they decide, the Supreme Court decides who America is going to be for many years to come. What a justice says, what they rule, and especially what they believe matters. So let’s get into that.
If you watched The Last Castle starring Robert Redford, you know that flying the American flag upside down over an American military outpost, has long been a signal of an emergency and a cry for help. The Alito flag flew that was flown upside down outside the justices’ home was raised by his wife in an angry response to a thoroughly ugly political spat with a neighbor and which according to the justice only flew ‘briefly’. ‘Briefly’ turns out to have been three days.
An inverted Old Glory has been adopted by the Stop The Steal folks - those who believe, but can never come up with a shred of evidence - as has been determined by some sixty courts of law - that the 2020 presidential election was actually won by ex-president Donald Trump and then somehow stolen by President Biden.
Then, shortly after Alito’s inverted American flag bruhaha and his insistence that it meant nothing more than, well…nothing, and certainly not a symbol of support for the MAGA movement, his other home, an ocean-side second home, was flying the pine-tree adorned Appeal To Heaven flag. Alito says only that the home, like the one in DC, is jointly owned with his wife and therefore she can do whatever she wants. That’s it. That’s the best argument that a Supreme Court Justice can put forth.
Turns out that the Appeal To Heaven flag is from a by-gone American era and that very few of us knew what the Appeal To Heaven flag meant, then or now. What we do know is that it, like the upside down flag, has been co-opted by the MAGA Stop The Steal campaign and that it was plentiful at the insurrection.
Here’s what else we know: “It was originally commissioned by a secretary of George Washington and flew on several military ships dating back to 1775, meant to signify a plea to a higher power for help saving early American colonies from the rule of the King of England. More recently, the flag was adopted as the symbol of the "An Appeal to Heaven" initiative of South Carolina preacher Dutch Sheets.
“Sheets is the leader of a group called the New Apostolic Reformation which is a far-right evangelical group whose goal is to re-Christianize the country and especially the government.
When Sheets discovers this flag in 2013, he sees this as the symbol of what he wants to do. He believes that the Supreme Court is not only too liberal, but that it's evil, that it's introducing bad things to the country. And he really admires Justice Alito. He refers to him as their “Great Hope” because Justice Alito cares about religious liberty. So one of the things Dutch Sheets does to popularize this flag and this set of ideas is that he tries to get the flag into the hands of powerful people. He gives it to Sarah Palin. He gives it to all sorts of political leaders. Just a few weeks before the 2020 election he gave it to President Donald Trump.”[1]
Sheets wants to promote Christian Nationalism - White Christian Nationalism - and he sees Alito as a tool. Maybe the tool.
“When people hear the phrase Christian nationalism” in the news, they do not always get the correct meaning. A common misunderstanding would be that it is the same thing as being a patriotic Christian,” according to Philip Gorski, chair of the Department of Sociology at Yale. “Patriotism is an adherence to the ideals of the United States. Nationalism is loyalty to your tribe, not your country.”
In a recent book Gorski traces white Christian nationalism in the United States to the late 1600s. Adherents believe in the idea that America was founded by Christians who modeled its laws and institutions after Protestant ideals with a mission to spread the religion and those ideals in the face of threats from non-whites, non-Christians, and immigrants.
Gorski assembled scholars and journalists for a two-day conference last week to define White Christian nationalism … and explore lingering questions about what role it may play in the November midterm elections and how much of a threat it represents to American democracy.
“We want there to be a deeper and clearer understanding of what White Christian nationalism is,” Gorski said. “It’s a term that even five years ago you wouldn’t hear outside of a seminar room, but since the January 6th attack on the Capitol, it’s started to circulate in national newscasts, sometimes applying to any set of ideas people don’t like. We want to be clear that it’s not all Christians, not all White people.”
Panelist Bart Bonikowski, associate professor of sociology and politics at New York University, spoke of how Christian nationalism in the United States is exclusionary and nostalgic, seeing the nation as going downhill and needing to be recaptured by people who see themselves at its rightful owners — possibly through authoritarian means. White Christian nationalists take advantage of preexisting societal cleavages to mobilize supporters, channeling their fears into resentments.” [2]
Let’s move on to voter suppression and I’ll tie all this together in a bit.
In March, 2020, in response to a Democratic led Coronavirus stimulus package in order to keep people out of the public contained provisions to vastly increased funds for absentee and mail-in voting, Donald Trump spoke up: “The things they had in there were crazy. They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
Earlier, Lindsay Graham had spoken up as well at the 2012 Republican National Convention: "The demographics race we're losing badly...[Republicans are] not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”
A little history of voting rights in the United States: White men, age 21 and older, who owned property were given the right to vote in 1776.
The 15th Amendment to the Constitution, in theory, removed racial barriers to voting in 1870, but states continued to practice voter discrimination and continued to deny Black voters a chance to participate in elections.
The right to vote was extended to white women in 1920.
It wasn't until 1965, after years of intimidation, murders, and advocacy that the path to the voting booth was cleared for Black people with the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965. The VRA was regarded as the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Era.
Section 5 was the key provision of the VRA: Requirements for certain states with a history of disenfranchising voters to obtain approval from the U.S. Department of Justice before they can make any changes to voting practices or procedures. They had to prove that the proposed change does not denying or infringe on the right to vote on account of race or color.
“The law has been a hugely successful shield against schemes that limit or dilute the voting power of communities with a history of being marginalized. This protection has been especially helpful in processes like redistricting, aka Gerrymandering, which has led to the election of hundreds of federal, state, and local candidates of color in states with a history of discrimination.
In the years after the Voting Rights Act’s passage, the disparity in registration rates between White and Black voters rates dropped from nearly 30 percentage points in the early 1960s to 8 percentage points just a decade later.” [3]
That all changed in 2013 when the Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, gutted the VRA by removing Section 5. Chief Justice John Roberts rationalized the decision by saying in effect that times had changed and Section 5 was no longer needed in these new and enlightened times.
Justice Alioto voted to gut the Voting Rights Act and then announced and read the decision. Within two hours of announcing the Shelby decision Texas introduced a voter suppression ID law that was dramatically successful in reducing the number of minorities that were legally able to vote. I guess Roberts had not been listening to Lindsay Graham or Donald Trump.
In the 2016 election of Clinton vs Trump, Black voter turnout declined by 7%. The narrative was Black people just didn’t show up to vote. Lazy. Lethargic. Uninvolved. Just don’t care. Overlooked and unacknowledged was the fact that 2016 what was the first election in 50 years without the protections of the voting rights act.
A decade ago, Pennsylvania’s Republican state Senate leader and state party chairman both pointed to the state’s new voter ID law as helping their party win the presidential election in their state. Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) did the same thing in Wisconsin in both 2016 and in 2012. And after that 2012 election, former Florida Republican Party chairman Jim Greer claimed his party was indeed trying to limit early voting to suppress Democratic votes. “It’s done for one reason and one reason only,” Greer told the Palm Beach Post, “We’ve got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us.”
And then there’s gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is the practice of setting boundaries of electoral districts to favor specific interests within legislative bodies, often resulting in districts with convoluted, winding boundaries rather than compact areas. The term "gerrymandering" was coined after a review of Massachusetts's redistricting maps of 1812 set by Governor Elbridge Gerry noted that one of the districts looked like a mythical salamander.
In the United States, redistricting or gerrymandering, takes place in each state about every ten years, after the decennial census. It defines geographical boundaries, with each district within a state being geographically contiguous and having about the same number of state voters. The resulting map affects the elections of the state's members of the United States House of Representatives and the state legislative bodies. We all live in and vote within districts.
Redistricting, or Gerrymandering, has always been regarded as a political exercise. But it’s more than that and has always taken three forms:
1. Partisan gerrymandering, which is aimed at favoring one political party while weakening another.
2. Bi-partisan gerrymandering, which is aimed at protecting incumbents by multiple political parties.
3. Racial gerrymandering, which is aimed at maximizing or minimizing the impact of certain racial groups.
With the advent of computers, district boundaries can be drawn with surgical precision neighborhood by neighborhood, blocked by block, street by street, and even house by house placing one house in one District in the house next-door in a different district.
In a practice called “Stacking and Packing” districts can be drawn in unbelievably squiggly lines that on the surface make no sense whatsoever. But when a layer is pulled back, you find that lines have been drawn to either minimize the number of minority voters per district, diluting the minority vote so that minorities can never get together and elect their preferred candidate. Or lines have been drawn that place all of the minorities in a single district so that minorities get one elected representative, but no more than that.
A couple weeks ago Scotus Blog published an article titled Court Rules For South Carolina Republicans In Dispute Over Congressional Map. In the case Alexander vs. South Carolina NAACP, “The Supreme Court on Thursday threw out a ruling by a federal district court holding that a congressional district on the South Carolina coast was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander – that is, it sorted voters based primarily on their race. In an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, the justices cleared the way for the state to use the map going forward. The 6-3 decision, with the justices divided on ideological lines, means that the disputed district will remain a safe seat for Republicans, who hold a 6-1 advantage in the state’s congressional delegation. More broadly, Thursday’s decision creates a high bar for plaintiffs in future racial gerrymandering cases to meet.
The issue at the center of the case was how courts should distinguish between the roles played in redistricting by race and party affiliation, when there are often close correlations between the two. In South Carolina, for example, exit polls in the 2020 election indicated that at least 90% of Black voters supported Democrat Joe Biden.
A lower court in March ordered the map to be used for the 2024 elections, after the Supreme Court failed to rule in the case by a proposed Jan. 1 deadline.
In his opinion for the majority, Justice Alito rejected the lower court’s conclusion that the state’s Republican-controlled legislature had improperly relied too heavily on race in drawing the challenged district. “Inferring bad faith based on the racial effects of a political gerrymander in a jurisdiction in which race and partisan preference are very closely correlated” would, Alito suggested, allow litigants and courts to circumvent the Supreme Court’s 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, holding that federal courts should not consider claims of partisan gerrymandering. Specifically, Alito posited, litigants could simply “repackage” their claims that legislatures relied too heavily on partisanship as contentions that the legislatures relied too much on race.
Joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Elena Kagan dissented from the court’s decision. Kagan took a very different view of the effects of Thursday’s decision, writing that it told legislators who wanted to rely on race – either “as a proxy to achieve partisan ends” or to “straight-up suppress the electoral influence of minority voters” – to “[g]o right ahead.” Legislators and mapmakers, she complained, can evade scrutiny by explaining that they relied on factors other than race.”
It’s interesting that several other American flags have been adopted by the extreme right and racial hate groups. Flags such as the so-called ‘original’ American flag, commonly referred as the 13-star Betsy Ross flag.
According to Keegan Hankes, research analyst for the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of America’s premier and arguably most successful hate-fighting groups, “The American flag sewn by Betsy Ross is not a symbol of early American history that is totally devoid of meaning. It has been used by some extremist groups as a means of telegraphing a return to more traditionalist (re: predominantly white and male) American ideals. “Under the guise of ‘heritage,’ symbols of early U.S. history have long been adopted by hate groups set on returning to a time when all non-white people were viewed as subhuman and un-American,” “Historically, these symbols have been used by white supremacists, both to hearken back to a time when black people were enslaved, while also painting themselves as the inheritors of the ‘true’ American tradition.”
Voter suppression works exactly as those who support the MAGA party and participated in the January 6thinsurrection envisioned. And Justice Samual Alito is not hesitant to fly his true colors from either of his flag poles. As the Brennan Center for Justice wrote a week ago, the Supreme Court Just Made Racial Gerrymandering Easier,
And how does this affect you? No group of Americans has ever fought for as long and as hard as have Black Americans for the United States to - as Doctor King asked so long ago - “All we say to America is, ‘Be true to what you said on paper’.”
Sources:
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-rights-act-explained
https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/05/court-rules-for-south-carolina-republicans-in-dispute-over-congressional-map/
[1] Gently edited for brevity. https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2024/05/23/appeal-to-heaven-flag-meaing-history-pine-tree-flag-supreme-court-justice-samuel-alito-beach-house/?sh=6bb355e23c0a
[2] Gently edited for brevity. https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2022/10/understanding-white-christian-nationalism
[3] Gently edited for brevity. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-rights-act-explained