Alito 'The Radical'

Jimmy Stewart in the famous 1939 'filibuster' movie "Mr Smith Goes To Washington"

Where does it say within the Constitution that if a liberal justice vacates a seat on the Court, he or she must be replaced by an equally liberal justice, or somehow the Court is destroyed. I haven't seen anywhere within the Constitution, nor the Federalist Papers, nor any other authoritative treatise on the Supreme Court wherein "proportional representation" or an "equal balance" of Justices is required nor desired, save for the ranting of those on the Left who fear losing their ability to legislate from the Bench.

If Judge Samuel Alito Jr.'s confirmation hearings lacked drama, apart from his wife's bizarrely over-covered crying jag, it is because they confirmed the obvious. Judge Alito is exactly the kind of legal thinker President Bush wants on the Supreme Court. He has a radically broad view of the president's power, and a radically narrow view of Congress's power. He has long argued that the Constitution does not protect abortion rights. He wants to reduce the rights and liberties of ordinary Americans, and has a history of tilting the scales of justice against the little guy.
[...]
The White House has tried to create an air of inevitability around this nomination. But there is no reason to believe that Judge Alito is any more popular than the president who nominated him. Outside a small but vocal group of hard-core conservatives, America has greeted the nomination with a shrug - and counted on its senators to make the right decision.

The real risk for senators lies not in opposing Judge Alito, but in voting for him. If the far right takes over the Supreme Court, American law and life could change dramatically. If that happens, many senators who voted for Judge Alito will no doubt come to regret that they did not insist that Justice O'Connor's seat be filled with someone who shared her cautious, centrist approach to the law.

This ignorant article which seems to be right up there with Teddy Kennedy's infamous "Robert Bork's America" diatribe, arrives at the conclusion that Alito is "radical" by lumping in arguments he advanced as a client advocate with misleading use of technical language that has a different meaning than in ordinary use.

Ann Althouse quite rightly says "Why? What exactly is the political dynamic for Democrats? If the shrugging Americans are suddenly awoken by a Court making extreme and unpopular decisions, will they blame the Democrats for not stopping him? If people don't like it, they should blame the President, who chose him. Then, the Supreme Court will become an important issue in the next presidential election, as it was not in 2004. The Democrats will be in a good position to argue that a Democratic President is needed to moderate the Court."

Like the rest of those who have come out in opposition to his confirmation, the only basis for The Paper of Record's rejection has to be ideological, transforming the process into an election rather than an appointment.

Either one has to believe that Supreme Court justices have to be vetted for ideology or that the process should be non-political. In both cases, the New York Times gets it wrong. If ideology is to remain outside of the process, then the only question for Judge Alito's confirmation is whether he has the competence to work on the Supreme Court. The ABA found him to have the highest degree of competence -- not the most conservative of groups either, one should remember -- as well as the highest degree of ethical practice. He has spent 15 years of fine public service on the federal appeals bench and almost a decade of work before that as a federal prosecutor, serving the people of the United States and enforcing the law. Outside of ideology, Judge Alito has the most experience in appellate law for a nominee in 70 years.

If ideology is to be considered, then the New York Times has it even more wrong. It asks whether a conservative should replace a centrist on the court. If ideology has suddenly become a qualifier, then one has to look at who nominates the candidate. The President won election twice, and at least during the last election, Supreme Court nominations clearly were a major issue. He has the mandate of the election to pick the ideological bent of the replacements for any opening on the Court; there is no quota system for leftists, centrists, and conservatives, nor have Presidents been particularly apt at guessing which categories their nominees would fill in the long run anyway. Bush's two elections show that the people want a more conservative court -- so as long as the Times considers ideology a basis for selection, then a conservative judge should be the most acceptable as a manifestation of the demand of the people.

The reason why the opposition to Alito now rests on ideology is because his critics failed to muster up any other rationale for opposing his confirmation, and quite frankly this constant talk of a filibuster is a whole load of hot air. The Democtaric members of The Judicial Committee tried their hardest to alarm people about the hot button issues, but all they got in response was a dead silence.

The trouble is that the paper's certainty about Alito's vote on abortion rights and its characterization of the judge's alleged consistent bias are both howlers and easily recognized as such. Hysterical claims of certainty and assertions of absurd lies don't persuade. They repel.

The only other supporting argument that the editorial offers regarding Alito’s supposed views on presidential power relates to his 1986 DOJ memo on presidential signing statements. This is at least the third New York Times editorial to trumpet this memo, yet there is no sign that the editorial writer has yet read and understood the memo. Alito, as head of a task force, was exploring how to implement a decision that the Attorney General had made. He wasn’t offering a proposal of his own. And his thoughtful memo presents at length various problems with implementing the decision.

The rest of the MSM seem to have abandoned the idea that there is a possibility of a filibuster, all that bully tactic strategy proved was that "Democrats had no clue about the role of a "loyal opposition" in American politics, and that their time in the wilderness had come none too soon. Not only did both parties use federal bench appointments in three successive election cycles -- each one won by the GOP -- but obstructionists such as Tom Daschle lost their seats on that issue alone.

Elections have consequences. So does the kind of McCarthyite smear jobs the Democrats attempted this week with Alito as part of its strategy to attack George Bush by ruining the reputation of his nominee, a longtime and exemplary member of the federal bench, through baseless allegations of bigotry and misogynism. The only way that the Democrats could possibly make themselves look worse on the dawn of the 2006 election cycle would be to delay or filibuster the obviously-qualified Alito's confirmation after a week of making idiots out of themselves."

In my newly acquired role of Daily Kos bashing I quote Armando's latest salvo:

"Thus, I urge the Senate, and in particular the Senators of the Democratic Caucus, to consider moving for extended debate to further consider the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court."

Pleeeease we beg for mercy. You would think they had enough of a bashing, without being gluttons for further punishment, but more importantly we cannot take any more, last week was painful to watch.

Comments

[Darrell]

I wonder if you know that "big business, big corporations, big oil, and big pharmaceuticals" provide the paychecks that keep this country in the highest standard of living this world has ever known. Maybe they should all go away. We could just try to sell each other "art" and put on little plays in the alleyways. You, GD, could sell your little tin-foil hats... The "exploitation" of the middle class will stop all right, because we all will be part of a single under class--feeding off each other, otherwise known as the "hell dimension" that the Socialists envision.

[Paul of York]

Some Democrats will excoriate the nominee one last time on the senate floor if only to put a smile on the face of their supporters.
I think once the judge takes his seat, he will join those justices who read our Constitution as it is written; neither adding or subtracting from what it says. They'll protect what is there and simply tell those who want it to read differently that they must seek another remedy.
I hope.

[Ghost Dansing]

Alito is a corporatist lawyer. The average American will never get an even shake from this guy. All rulings will be in favor of big business, big corporations, big oil, big pharmaceuticals, big exploitation of the American middle class and no defense from the government.

That's what the Republican Party is all about, and that's why Alito's their man.