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joining me now is dahlia lithwick, legal correspondent at slate msnbc law and politics analyst and hostis also the author of lady justice, women, the law and the battle to save america. welcome back to the saturday show. let's start with justice alito in a piece you cowrote. you say samuel alito's explanations for his wife's upside down american flag make the story even worse. how? >> as representative raskin just said, throwing your wife under the bus has to be just the saddest defense i've ever heard. the notion that, as he said when he clarified the story with a reporter from fox news, the problem was the neighborhood was roiled in politics. his decision or his wife's decision was to respond by punching back with politics is the definition of the problem. if this were just he didn't like the way a tree was falling over his property and said this is just a neighbor dispute then i suppose we could shrug and say he had to do the flag but it's over nothing. the fact that this was over the election itself and he decided to perform an act of resistance to the election result is the definit

ari berman, dahlia lithwick, thank you for your time and wisdom. i'm not going to say calming alarmed ause i'm more than i ever have been, but thank you for your time tonight. i t appreciate you. >>> coming up ronald reagan -- once again it's reagan night. ronald reagan visited the heavily bureaucratic bronx in 1980, and i tonight donald trum tried to same thing. >>> but first an appeals court today shutdown trump's hail mary tory get judge juan merchan thrn off his case. the latest in the hush money trials denials is next. st in thy trials denials is next hi, i'm chris and i lost 57 pounds on golo. golo isn't complicated. i don't have to follow a restrictive diet, and i don't have to spend a lot of time making meals. using golo was truly transformative. it was easy, and inexpensive. why choose a sleep number smart bed? can it keep me warm when i'm cold? wait, no, i'm always hot. sleep number does that. now, save 50% on the sleep number limited edition smart bed. plus, free home delivery when you add any base shop now at sleepnumber.com a slow netw

. >> joining us now, slate senior editor dahlia lithwick, and msnbc law and politics analyst and former u.s. attorney and msnbc legal analyst joyce vance. ladies, senator tillis was willing to concede the flags were unwise but dahlia, even he's still treating it like a manufactured controversy. isn't it in republicans' interest to want to rehabilitate the court's recent ethics problems? >> it's a good question. i don't think it's in their interests at all. i think that this is part of a much larger project of discrediting institutions, discrediting, you know, federal prosecutors and the trump immunity case, discrediting government agencies. i mean, this is all of a piece, and so even though you would think, right, that it would be in republican senators and congress people's interests to prop up the authority of a court that has no army and no budget and no person, no sword, but i think it's part of a larger sort of seeding of the notion that there really is no law anymore, everything's corrupt, you know, so flying a maga flag or a stop the steal flag, there's no rules anymore, and i th

. >> dahlia lithwick, we now have thanks to journalists like your and aric and the pulitzer prize winninga report about the leak and the daily insight from the court. we now have a growing body of investigative journalism that points to a couple things. one, complete, flagrant disregard for the spirit of the -- of any ethics applying to at least justices alito and thomas. we also now have journalism, in "the new york times," that makes abundantly clear that flags that were flown on january 6th were proudly, i mean, they were flown at a time when it was in the news that these images were flown by insurrectionists. where anyone could have googled the story i googled when the stories broke and seen the insurrection on that day. where staffers and other people around the alitos have to have told them that. and the flag, especially the heaven flag was up for years before january 6th. >> yeah, i think there's two things that are really interesting. and your larger point is descriptively completely correct. i think that the press corps missed a lot of years for a lot of bad behavior. and thank g