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Congratulations to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who responded to importuning senators by letting Justice Samuel Alito respond for himself. Justice Alito’s reply on Wednesday: He has “an obligation to sit” on cases under the Supreme Court’s code of conduct.
Sens. Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse, the bully boys of the Judiciary Committee, wrote the chief justice last week demanding a meeting and that Alito recuse himself from hearing cases related to the 2020 election or Donald Trump.
As the senators know, the court’s code stipulates that individual justices make their own recusal decisions. Thus the chief was right to let Alito respond for himself, if he chose. His letter gives the senators more courtesy than they deserve given their clear partisan motivation and their attempt to violate the separation of powers.
Alito cites the court’s code of conduct provision that “A Justice is presumed impartial and has an obligation to sit unless disqualified.” And a justice should disqualify himself only when “the Justice’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned, that is, where an unbiased and reasonable person who is aware of all relevant circumstances would doubt that the Justice could fairly discharge his or her duties.”
The two senators are the most biased people on the planet regarding the court. Their complaint is that a pair of flags flown at Alito’s homes suggest partiality. But the justice explains in some detail that the decision to fly the two flags was made by his wife, who has her own mind and right to free speech, and that the justice had nothing to do with her decisions.
Martha-Ann Alito “makes her own decisions, and I have always respected her right to do so,” Justice Alito writes. “She has made many sacrifices to accommodate my service on the Supreme Court, including the insult of having to endure numerous, loud, obscene, and personally insulting protests in front of our home that continue to this day and now threaten to escalate.”
