It’s easy to be furious at Samuel Alito, who has recently racked up yet another petty personal grievance display over, of all things, flags. Last week saw the earthquake report that his wife flew a flag upside down—signaling either that the country is in danger or that the election was stolen—in the days after the Jan 6 attack on the capitol. This week, the New York Times further reports that Alito was flying an “Appeal to Heaven” flag at his New Jersey beach house this past summer. That flag is not merely another January 6 signifier but also rooted in John Locke’s “appeal to heaven,” meaning “a responsibility to rebel, even use violence, to overthrow unjust rule.”

In some ways, this is another very ridiculous, very 2024 story about the lengths to which ostensible adults will go toward owning the libs, and one justice’s fantastically bad judgment and cluelessness about the appearance of impropriety. But this is not even about Samuel Alito. Neither, actually was the bombshell report about his alleged leak of the outcome of the Hobby Lobby decision in 2014 to wealthy religious Supreme Court lobbyists about Samuel Alito. To expend energy railing against this one petty, petty little man is to inveigh against the symptom, as opposed to the problem.

It is just as easy to be enraged at Clarence Thomas and his myriad and corrosive ethics violations. His wife has texted with Mark Meadows over what she believed to be a stolen 2020 election, tried to encourage state legislators to support a slate of dummy electors, attended part of the Stop the Steal rally on Jan 6, and testified before the Jan 6 committee that she still believed that election was stolen. And Thomas has declined to recuse himself from the three Jan 6 cases heard at the high court this year. But again, this is not about Ginni or Clarence Thomas. To expend energy hopelessly trying to shame Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito is an act of incalculable futility.

It is not even, I fear, about Chief Justice John Roberts, who might have, in a different time and under different circumstances, been the type of history-minded leader who would have dealt with this shameless and flagrant squandering of the court’s reputation as a serious body. After all, Roberts once told Jeffrey Rosen in the Atlantic that “the Court is also ripe for a similar refocus on functioning as an institution, because if it doesn’t it’s going to lose its........

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