In fact, as the Lincoln Project’s Steve Schmidt pointed out this past weekend:
“Mrs. Alito was so alarmed by the degradations and profane, yet
protected speech that she went immediately home, and inverted the
American flag signaling distress. Here’s the problem: there were no
school buses and no school children on them in January 2021 in
Alexandria, Virginia. Schools in the city were closed for a full year as
a result of the pandemic and didn’t re-open until March 2021.”
But Alito’s fingers were apparently far deeper in the January
6th coup attempt than most Americans realize. Trump lawyer Sydney Powell
pointed out on Stew Peters’ rightwing YouTube channel that she, Louie Gohmert, and Kari Lake (among others) had filed a lawsuit against Vice President Mike Pence to prevent him from certifying the Electoral College vote on January 6th.
It was a legal attempt to try to do what Trump sent a mob to do when the legal strategy failed:
“We were filing a 12th Amendment constitutional challenge to
the process that the Congress was about to use per the Electoral Act
provisions that simply don’t jibe with the 12th Amendment to the United
States Constitution, and Justice Alito was our circuit court justice for that.
Louie Gohmert was the plaintiff in our lawsuit and we were suing the
Vice President to follow the 12th Amendment as opposed to the Electoral
Count Act.” (emphasis mine)
The 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804, is the provision under which a
contested election for president gets thrown to Congress, as happened in
the 1876 election where Democrat Sam Tilden got more electoral and
popular votes than Republican Rutherford B. Hayes by the first count.
That election ended up thrown to the House because three
states had submitted two sets of Electoral College votes (just like
Trump’s fake electors), so Congress cut a deal to end Reconstruction in
exchange for making Hayes president, even though he arguably lost the
election.
The lawsuit, filed by Gohmert, Kari Lake, and a handful of
Republican operatives, demanded the delay so Republicans on the Supreme
Court could decide who’d be president, just like they did in the 2000
election. It called for:
“[R]espondent Vice President of the United States to refrain
from invoking the dispute-resolution provisions of the Electoral Count
Act of 1887 … for the duration of this Court’s consideration of a timely
filed petition for a writ of certiorari. As set
forth in the argument below, the ECA violates the Electors’ Clause, the
Twelfth Amendment, and the Constitution’s structural protections of
liberty.”
If Alito would rule that Pence must defer to Congress per the
12th Amendment, the election of 2020 would be thrown to the House with
each state having one vote. There, the presidency would have gone to
Trump 27-23, because 27 states’ congressional delegations were then controlled by Republicans.
This was not a brand-new or hastily organized plan. I wrote on March 13, 2020
— eight months before the election — that Republicans I knew in
Washington DC had informed me that the Trump folks were planning this exact strategy.
And, sure enough, here it was, with Sam Alito as the inside man.
The invasion of the House chamber by the “stop the steal” traitors
was, by the theory of this plan, supposed to delay the counting of
electoral college votes at least for a day, to give Alito time to act on
the next day, January 7th. He and the courts would then rule that the
12th amendment took precedent to law made since then, Congress would
declare Trump the winner, and that would be the end of the discussion.
But Nancy Pelosi got wind of the plot and blew it up by
re-convening Congress at 8 pm to count the votes, just two hours after
the last of the rioters had left the building and before Alito could
rule. As Trump‘s senior attorney Powell told Peters:
“Nancy Pelosi had finagled to file an amicus
brief in it — there had been inside goings on in Congress where I
believe it was Steve Scalise and [Speaker Kevin] McCarthy [who] kept her
from being an actual party; she wanted to work herself inside the case
as a party but somehow that didn’t happen — so she got notice when we
made our filing because she’d filed an amicus
brief. And then everything broke loose and she really speeded up
reconvening Congress to get the vote [count] going, or [Bill Barr’s]
Justice [Department] might have issued an injunction to stop it all,
which is what should have happened.”
In the end, Alito had to turn down the lawsuit on the morning
of January 7th because Congress had already voted to certify the
election for Biden.
As a result, we’ll never know how close we came to having a single
corrupt Supreme Court justice overturn the election, but that flag
flying outside his house gives us a pretty good clue as to what he may
well have done the morning of January 7th had Pelosi not quickly acted
the previous evening.
But Alito’s attempts to overturn our democracy weren’t
limited to his support for Trump’s treasonous acts on January 6th. Were
it not for Alito, Clarence Thomas, and at least two other Republicans on
the Court, Donald Trump would by now have almost certainly been
convicted in federal Judge Tanya Chutkan’s courtroom of seditiously
trying to overthrow our government.
That federal criminal case was rapidly moving along when
Trump’s lawyers made the absurd assertion that he was immune from
prosecution for his attempted sedition because of a brand new,
previously unheard of, and totally bizarre, made-up doctrine of
presidential immunity. Even Richard Nixon didn’t have the cojones to try that one: he simply admitted his guilt and accepted a pardon to avoid going to prison.
It only takes four members of the Court to grant certiorari,
allowing the Court to hear a case: four or more Republicans on the
Court went out of their way to give Trump the delay he desperately
needed. On February 28th, they granted cert and scheduled oral arguments for the very last day of their 2023-2024 session, the week of April 22nd.
To add insult to the injury to our republic, in oral
arguments Alito dropped this little bomb on America, turning the case
against Trump inside-out and claiming Trump should get a free pass to
crime all he wanted:
“I’m sure you would agree with me that a stable democratic society
requires that a candidate who loses an election, even a close one, even a
hotly contested one, leave office peacefully, if that candidate is an
incumbent?
“All right. Now if an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly
contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is
not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful
retirement, but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a
bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that
destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?
“And we can look around the world and find countries where we have seen this process, where the loser gets thrown in jail.”
Thankfully, at least for the historical record, the Attorney
representing Jack Smith’s Justice Department, Michael Dreeben,
immediately replied:
“I think it’s exactly the opposite, Justice Alito.”
But Alito, not Dreeben, is on the Court and is the
decision-maker. Alito thus gave — and continues to give — Trump a
desperately needed further delay by slow-walking his own part of the
Court’s decision in the Trump immunity case.
Even if they rule against Trump, which everybody assumed would happen
before Alito dropped that rhetorical turd into the proceeding, by
giving Donny the delay he wanted, the Republicans on the Court reduced
the chance that Trump will ever be held to account for his crimes.
While the Court typically releases their decisions during the summer,
they have the option of waiting as long as they want — even until well
past the November election date. So, if Trump is elected, he can fire
Jack Smith and end the prosecution himself.
And it’s not like Alito and Thomas don’t have a stake
in this fight. If Biden is re-elected, by the 2028 election Alito will
be 78 and Thomas 80. Insiders have speculated that both would like to retire soon and have their replacements appointed by a Republican president.
"Coke Can" Clarence Thomas: "Look, my hands are clean. Not a single pubic hair anywhere."
