Samuel Alito’s Opinions Are Just As Upside-Down as His Flag

On Thursday, MAGA’s chief justice and amateur vexillophile Samuel Alito once again used his unchecked power on the Supreme Court to help Republicans win elections. In so doing, he moved the country a little closer to his ultimate goal of reading the Reconstruction amendments right out of the Constitution. He did this through a case called Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP. At issue was South Carolina’s racist congressional map—and more specifically, the way the South Carolina Republican legislature had redrawn the contours of the state’s District 1. District 1 is currently represented by Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace. It’s historically been a safe district for Republicans, but in 2018 a Democrat, Joe Cunningham took the seat with just 50.6 percent of the vote. (Twenty eighteen was a weird election, not just because it was the “blue wave” year, but also because the seat had previously belonged to Republican Mark Sanford, who was embroiled in a sex scandal.) In 2020, Nancy Mace narrowly defeated Cunningham to retake the seat for Republicans, but by the same razor thin margin. To avoid these kinds of close scrapes in the future, Republicans redrew the district after the 2020 census, and Mace...