Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the current chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is demanding that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito recuse himself immediately — which would entail him stepping aside — from court cases including the nation’s highest court’s current consideration of Trump’s legal claims that he holds wide-ranging “presidential immunity.”
Trump is trying to use the claims to shut down a federal criminal case that he is facing over actions after the 2020 presidential race, when he and a large number of allies went after the outcome, meaning Biden’s win.
Trump claims that presidents should enjoy far-reaching protections from even the possibility of prosecution for actions taken amid their official responsibilities, and that’s where Trump groups what he was doing. Though the evident end-point of Trump’s ambitions would have been the invalidation of the collective impact of tens of millions of duly documented votes for president, he says he was acting in the benefit of the American people in going after imaginary fraud.
And as for Alito, recent media reports revealed that an upside down American flag showed up outside his house in January 2021. The imagery is associated with the “Stop the Steal” movement, meaning the throngs of Trump’s grassroots supporters rallying around election conspiracy theories.
“Justice Alito should recuse himself immediately from cases related to the 2020 election and the January 6th insurrection, including the question of the former President’s immunity in U.S. v. Donald Trump, which the Supreme Court is currently considering,” Durbin said, per journalist Shannon Bream.
Alito is blaming his wife, who he claims put up the imagery amid a dispute with a neighbor over signage they displayed. He’s known as an arch-conservative, having helped lead the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022… a move, mind you, that Trump vocally supports.
