Democrats go flag crazy – Washington Examiner

June is approaching, which means the Supreme Court is set to issue all its most important decisions before justices recess for the summer. Thanks to the Democrats‘ relentless campaign to delegitimize the nation’s justice system, the arrival of June also now means it is time for media hit pieces on conservative Supreme Court justices and their families.

Right on schedule, the New York Times released a doozy of a tendentious article last week dredging up a story about an upside-down American flag hung at Justice Samuel Alito’s home … three years ago! Democrats want people to believe Alito flew the flag to signal support for the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, and President Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement. 

They also want people to believe this is some kind of “ethics” violation because the Supreme Court was considering two Trump-related cases at that time. Democrats, including Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL), have since claimed that because of this flag flying, “Alito must recuse himself immediately from cases related to the 2020 election and the January 6th insurrection.”

That’s not happening, nor should it. The suggestion is a characteristically vicious one from the senator. The claim being made about the significance of the upside-down flag falls apart upon the slightest inspection. Trump had already conceded by the time the flag was flown. Of the two 2020 election cases the court was considering, one would not have altered the outcome of the election, and Alito specifically said he would not grant any relief in the other. 

The flag was hung in a dispute with foul-mouthed neighbors. And the New York Times offers no evidence that an upside-down American flag was ever known to anyone as a symbol of the Stop the Steal movement. It has traditionally been known as a sign of distress, which the Alitos were under from their expletive-spewing neighbors.

Hope that Democrats would abandon their embarrassingly feeble attack was, naturally, dashed, for the party and the leftist movement it represents do not embarrass easily. The New York Times this week circulated a second photo of a flag, this time from a year ago at the Alito beach house where, next to a Philadelphia Phillies flag, hung an “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which the news outlet claimed was another symbol of the Jan. 6 riot. CBS Evening News dutifully opened its broadcast with the story noting that “dozens” of Democratic lawmakers were calling on Alito to recuse himself from Trump-related cases.

This is contemptible stuff. While some rioters can be seen carrying Appeal to Heaven flags on Jan. 6, many also carried regular American flags as well as Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” flags. Are all these, including our national flag, not to be regarded as expressions of political extremism?

The Appeal to Heaven flag was first commissioned by George Washington himself in 1775. So Democrats are right in one sense; the flag is a symbol of insurrection — just not the insurrection to which they want to connect it. The phrase “an appeal to heaven” comes from the 17th-century English philosopher John Locke, whose writings, including Two Treatises of Government, were often cited by the authors of the Constitution. This is a flag that has been flown by patriots since before the founding of the nation. To associate it with treason is pure demagoguery.

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That Democrats have been reduced to using years-old pictures of flags to attack the legitimacy of the Supreme Court is pathetic. Does the party have nothing better or more substantive to discuss this presidential election year? Are President Joe Biden’s poll numbers on the economy so bad that pictures of flags flown at judges’ beach houses must be disinterred from the vaults of history? Are we going to be told that Justice Clarence Thomas flying a Betsy Ross flag on his RV shows he supports returning to slavery? Democrats are grasping at straws.

With Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) retiring, if Biden wins reelection and Democrats maintain control of the Senate, they will abolish the filibuster and pass legislation to pack the court, and then they will appoint the youngest and most radical far-left justices possible. That is the entire point of these silly flag stories.