The left and their scare tactics aren’t fooling the Supreme Court

By Miranda Devine

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito Jr. and his wife Martha-Ann Alito pay their respects at the casket of Reverend Billy Graham at the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol Building.
This week’s Dem target is Justice Samuel Alito, whose crime is having a wife who is “fond of flying flags,” writes columnist Miranda Devine.AP

For all the squawking from Democrats that Donald Trump is a “threat to democracy,” their relentless attacks on the Supreme Court are the gravest threat to the republic. 

This week’s target is Justice Samuel Alito, whose crime is having a wife who is “fond of flying flags,” as he put it in a droll letter Wednesday to Biden allies in the Senate who are demanding he recuse himself from two Trump special-counsel cases. 

As Joe Biden languishes in the polls, and the New York hush-money trial has done nothing to dent Trump’s electoral appeal, Dems are trying ever more dastardly ploys to sabotage the Republican’s campaign. 

Manufacturing a scandal out of flags flown by Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann, outside their home is their pathetic attempt to force the Supreme Court to deliver a favorable outcome in the lawfare cases they are counting on to give Biden an unfair advantage in November. 

They are desperate to tilt the court in their favor by cutting down Alito and fellow formidable conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife is also being used to damage him.

Harassment campaign 

The New York Times was more than happy to oblige by sending a reporter to muckrake around Alito’s neighbors in suburban Virginia and dredge up evidence of his wife’s flag-raising villainy. 

Turns out the Alitos have some very unpleasant neighbors.

The 35-year-old BLM activist daughter of a retired PBS executive who lives down the road decided to move into her mother’s house with her boyfriend and their “pandemic puppy” in 2020 and then proceeded to torment the Alitos.

Her campaign of harassment included picketing their house with signs saying, “Abort SCOTUS,” “Fascist Alito” and “Alito was @ Jan 6,” plastering her mother’s front yard (near a school) with political signs like “F–K Trump,” “Trump Is a Fascist” and “You Are Complicit.” One day the daughter, or her boyfriend, called Mrs. Alito a “c–t.” 

Martha-Ann Alito was understandably distressed about the harassment campaign.

So what dastardly deed did she commit in response?

She hoisted an upside-down flag outside their home, a traditional symbol of distress that Biden allies now claim is nothing but a symbol of the “Stop the Steal” campaign. 

The intrepid New York Times also delivered the incredible scoop that Mrs. Alito hoisted the perfectly uncontroversial “Appeal to Heaven” flag outside their vacation home in New Jersey. 

The historical pine tree flag originally was flown from George Washington’s ships during the Revolutionary War, but the Times and its Democrat handlers have recast it as a dangerous “insurrectionist symbol,” having found that it was sighted in the crowd outside the Capitol on Jan. 6. 

The Internet has been hastily rewritten to portray the flag as malign, and liberal venues such as the San Francisco City Hall, which had happily flown the flag in its Civic Center Plaza since 1964, quietly removed it over the weekend, all the better to tar the Alitos with the insurrectionist brush. 

It’s exactly this kind of frenzied propaganda that resulted in an assassination attempt on Justice Brett Kavanagh after the Dobbs decision was leaked and nonstop illegal picketing outside the homes of the conservative justices. 

Democrats have no compunctions about flirting with assassination incitement when it comes to Trump. The latest culprit is pulp-fiction writer John Grisham, who appeared on ABC’s ‘The View” this week to fantasize about killing judges. 

“I wrote a great book called ‘The Pelican Brief’ in which two Supreme Court justices were assassinated,” he said, “and I thought about doing it again.” 

‘Don’t get upset’ 

Joy Behar realized his glee might get them into trouble. 

“No, no, no,” she said as the audience laughed along. 

“Writing part two,” interjected Whoopi Goldberg.

“He’s talking about writing part two.” 

“It’s all fiction,” said Grisham, disingenuously.

“Don’t get upset.” 

Then he opined that “the court has never looked as bad in my lifetime, some of the rulings, the ethical challenges.” 

What are the ethics of going on national television and joking about assassinating Supreme Court justices? 

In his letter to Senate Democrats Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse, Justice Alito said he was not obliged to recuse himself and explained he had nothing to do with the flying of the upside-down flag.

When he asked his wife to take it down, she refused.

“She makes her own decisions, and I have always respected her right to do so . . . 

“My wife’s reasons for flying the [upside-down] flag are not relevant [but] she was greatly distressed at the time due, in large part, to a very nasty neighborhood dispute in which I had no involvement.” 

He said neither he nor his wife was aware of any connection between the Appeal to Heaven flag and the Stop the Steal movement, but he points out that “the use of an old historic flag by a new group does not necessarily drain that flag of all other meanings.” 

In contrast to Alito’s concise wit, the House Democrats’ unscrupulous hit man Jamie Raskin wrote a pompous op-ed maligning Alito and Thomas for The New York Times Wednesday, whining that “the highest court in the land has the lowest ethical standards.” 

Raskin wants Attorney General Merrick Garland to spark a constitutional crisis by inserting himself into the Democrats’ recusal campaign.

He also thinks it’s a great idea to get the Biden-nominated US attorney for the District of Columbia, Matthew Graves, to “petition the other seven justices to require Justices Alito and Thomas to recuse themselves.” 

Graves is a registered Democrat, a Democratic donor who worked for the Biden 2020 presidential campaign as a volunteer and was handpicked by Biden to lead his pet project, the cavalcade of prosecutions against Trump supporters charged over Jan. 6.

One of his first acts on coming to office was to refuse his Delaware counterpart David Weiss’ request to charge Hunter Biden on tax-fraud offenses in his district. 

So much for Raskin’s ethical standards. 

‘Ethics’ czar 

CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen, another rank partisan harbored by the liberal Brookings Institution, is part of the Alito attack machine, penning endless articles demanding his recusal and lambasting the court as “ethically conflicted.” 

All you need to know about Eisen’s own ethical standards is that he was the Obama White House “ethics” czar, who said not a word when Hunter Biden joined the Burisma board in Ukraine for $1 million a year.

He said not a word when Hunter brought his business partner into the White House to get photos with his VP dad for a promotion on Burisma’s website.

Not a peep from Mr. Ethics when Joe took Hunter to China on Air Force 2 in 2013 and met with his Beijing business partner. 436

In a must-read article by ­Revolver.com titled: Meet Norm Eisen: Legal Hatchet Man and Central Operative in the ‘Color Revolution’ Against President Trump, Ethical Eisen is fingered as an architect of “nearly every attempt to delegitimize, impeach, censor, sue and remove” Trump. 

He’s still at it, with the undermining of the Supreme Court a key weapon in destroying Trump’s candidacy. 

These are the self-proclaimed guardians of democracy. It’s safe to say that if you hear a leftist bleating about democracy, you know they are up to no good.