After Another Right-Wing Flag Is Seen Flying At Samuel Alito’s Home, Calls Grow For Supreme Court Justice To Recuse Himself From Jan. 6 Cases

A right-wing flag flew outside Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s beach vacation home in Long Beach Island, New Jersey.

The “Appeal to Heaven” flag had been seen flying at Alito’s beach home on Google Images searches in July and September 2023. Still, it was unclear how long the flag was flying or how much time the Supreme Court Justice had spent there.

The “Appeal to Heaven” flag, otherwise known as the “Pine Tree” flag, features an old evergreen tree drawn on a white background with “An Appeal to Heaven” written in black block letters. 

Col. Joseph Reed, a right-hand man to then-General George Washington during the Revolutionary War, originally designed the flag.

“Please fix upon some particular color for a flag and a signal by which our vessels may know one another,” Reed mentioned in a letter from Cambridge, Mass. to Colonels John Glover and Stephen Moylan, dated October 20, 1775, according to researchers. “What do you think of a flag with white ground and a tree in the middle, with the motto ‘AN APPEAL TO HEAVEN’ – this is the flag of our floating batteries?”

Several of the flags had been spotted in the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in support of Donald Trump and attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Trump’s supporters had adopted Revolutionary War symbolism and slogans while they fought the 2020 election outcome.

The “Appeal to Heaven” flag called for a conservative, Biblical-centered government. Nearly ten years ago, the flag was reported to be the source of discord in south Arkansas, as the Appeal to Heaven movement attempted to ignite it.

According to the “Appeal to Heaven” website, the movement’s purpose is “to honor the Lord by networking elected officials who are believers in Jesus Christ, who regularly attend and display a commitment to an evangelical, Gospel-centered church and who will commit to live and govern based on biblical, constitutional and Federalist principles.”

The group also details the beliefs behind the flag on their website. 

“Individuals have the right to worship God freely without the threat of government intrusion,” it states. “Marriage was created by God as the union of one man and one woman for life as the basic building block of society. Life begins at conception and should be protected … Taxes should be levied only to support essential functions of government that individuals cannot do for themselves. The traditional, regressive income and property taxes should be replaced with a fair, sales based tax model.”

Last week, the New York Times also reported that an upside-down U.S. flag, also called a “Stop the Steal” flag, was flying outside of Alito’s home in Alexandria, Virginia, after the Capitol attack in 2021. The outlet published a photo of the inverted flag, reporting that it had been seen at the residence on January 17, 2021, for several days, worrying the neighbors.

The justice said in an emailed statement that he “had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag” and that his wife Martha-Ann Alito had placed it there” briefly “in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs. His wife argued with another family in the neighborhood about an anti-Trump sign they had placed on their lawn.

The neighbors had viewed the flag as a political statement.

The Times report provoked calls for Alito to recuse himself from several high-profile cases pending before the court this year involving the 2020 presidential election and following the Capitol attack, such as whether Trump could claim immunity from federal election subversion charges.

News of another flag brought renewed calls for Alito to step aside from cases surrounding the former president. 

“At this point, it is difficult to make any reasonable case for Alito’s impartiality,” Noah Bookbinder, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said in a statement. “It can and must be questioned. As a result, he must not sit on cases about the 2020 election or the insurrection he appears to have supported.”

Bookbinder’s group represented Colorado voters in the high court’s “insurrection clause” case, which sought to remove Trump from the ballot.

There is no indication that Alito would step down from the cases.

Financial disclosure filings showed that Alito sold shares of the beer giant Anheuser-Busch InBev at the same time the company faced backlash from conservatives over its partnership with transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney in a social media campaign.

Alito’s stock transactions sparked accusations that he is engaged in or aligned with partisan politics despite an adopted code of conduct that tells justices to “refrain from political activity.”

The justice sold between $1,000 and $15,000 of A.B. InBev’s stock on August 14, 2023.