Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is facing mounting calls for him to recuse himself from cases dealing with the 2020 election after the New York Times published photos of an upside-down flag flying outside his Virginia home.
The inverted flag, adopted by Trump supporters as a symbol of the "Stop the Steal" movement, was seen waving on the front lawn of his Alexandria home a little more than a week after a mob attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 in an effort to disrupt the counting of the 2020 vote.
Sen. Dick Durbin, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Alito's flying the inverted flag "creates the appearance of bias."
The Illinois Democrat said the justice should remove himself from cases involving the 2020 election, the Jan. 6 riot and former President Donald Trump immunity claims, which the Supreme Court is currently considering.
"The Court is in an ethical crisis of its own making, and Justice Alito and the rest of the Court should be doing everything in their power to regain public trust," he said in a statement.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, who sits on the judiciary committee, said the flag raises serious questions about Alito's ability to be impartial.
"If a judge on any other federal court had done this, the allegation would be investigated because it calls into question a person's ability to fairly decide a case," Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, told CNN in a statement.
"Through a long string of problematic behavior that has leaked out in the press, the far-right justices have demonstrated that they too should be subject to an enforceable ethics code," he said. "They are not capable of policing themselves."
Another member of the panel, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas said the story is an attempt by the New York Times to "smear" Alito and "incite another mod to try to intimidate justices, harass them at home, or worse. Shameful!"
Alito blamed his wife for flying the flag.
"I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag," Alito said in an emailed statement to the New York Times. "It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor's use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs."
In an interview Friday with Fox News, Alito said his wife, Martha-Ann, got into a dustup with some neighbors over a "F--- Trump" flag displayed near a children's bus stop.
The justice said the neighbors blamed her for Jan. 6 and one called her derogatory names, "including the C-word."
Justice Clarence Thomas is also under pressure to recuse himself from similar Trump cases since his wife, longtime conservative activist and Trump booster Virginia Thomas, was a key leader in the "Stop the Steal" campaign to overturn 2020 election results, despite a lack of evidence that there were anything but legimtimate. She attended the Jan. 6, 2021, rally outside the Capitol, but did not storm the building with other Trump supporters.
