Political analysts and pundits are digging into Alito's past and pulling out all kinds of scary possibilities for how we'll all suffer if he is confirmed.
In a column posted yesterday at truthout, Marjorie Cohn lays it all on the table. This stuff all paints a pretty bleak picture of the fate of human rights and civil liberties if Alito does make it onto the Supreme Court. He's all about giving power to the government and to businesses, not to the individual American citizen.
An excerpt:
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Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee began its confirmation hearings on the nomination of Samuel Alito for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.
Alito is no John Roberts. Whereas Roberts had barely been a judge for two years when Bush nominated him for the Supreme Court, Alito has authored 361 opinions during his 15-year tenure on the federal court bench. Whereas Roberts is photogenic, with a winning smile, Alito is stiff and awkward before the cameras. Most significantly, whereas Roberts replaced Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who had a similar judicial philosophy, Alito would take the place of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who provided the swing vote 77 percent of the time.
If confirmed, Alito would tip the high court's delicate balance radically to the right. Nearly always favoring the government, corporations and universities, Alito has ruled against individual rights in 84 percent of his dissents.
In a 196-page report released last week, the Alliance for Justice (AFJ) determined that in split decisions - the "difficult cases" - "the reasoning Judge Alito employs and the results he reaches are not balanced. Rather," the report found, "they track the staunchly conservative political and legal views he expressed in his 1985 application to be Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel in President Reagan's Justice Department."
Alito's 1985 application stresses his commitment to federalism (states' rights), his view that "the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion," and his disagreement with the criminal procedure, reapportionment (one-man, one-vote), and Establishment Clause (church-state separation) decisions of the Warren Court.
The members of the Senate Judiciary Committee drew clear lines in yesterday's session. Although abortion was a significant concern for three senators from each party, the limitation on executive power was a much more prominent theme during the opening statements.
Six Democratic senators, as well as committee chairman Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), expressed alarm at the recent revelation that Bush has been secretly spying on Americans since 2002. Five Democrats made reference to O'Connor's opinion for the Court in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld: "We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens."
Alito's record reveals that he "has been extraordinarily deferential to the exercise of government power, especially executive branch power, except in cases involving alleged infringements on religious expression," according to the AFJ. His "judicial record strongly suggests that he will ... interpret the Constitution as giving the president greater authority to evade Congressional statutes and constitutional limitations whenever deemed essential to national security."
Indeed, in a memorandum he wrote as a lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department, Alito argued that the attorney general should receive absolute immunity from lawsuits when he illegally wiretaps Americans. The Supreme Court rejected Alito's view in a 1985 decision.
Alito also advocated that the president make a "signing statement" indicating what he thinks the law means when he signs a bill. Even though the Constitution grants the lawmaking power only to Congress, and thus courts look to congressional intent to interpret statutes, Alito hoped that the president could divert the courts' focus away from congressional intent in favor of what he called "the President's intent."
George W. Bush has issued at least 108 such "signing statements," according to the Washington Post. Most recently, Bush qualified his concurrence with the McCain amendment that outlaws torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, implying that he would be free to torture if he felt it was necessary for national security.
In 2000, Alito told a Federalist Society meeting that he was a strong proponent of the "unitary executive," which means that all federal executive power resides in the president. This theory would reject discretionary executive power of independent agencies Congress has created since the New Deal, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Federal Reserve Board.
Alito argued in other memoranda that the Federal Bureau of Investigation should have broad latitude to investigate federal employees, and that an American Bar Association opinion prohibiting lawyers from secretly taping conversations should not prevent IRS lawyers from secretly taping as part of a federal criminal investigation.
Although the senators only touched on Alito's alarming civil rights record in yesterday's session, one would hope they would fully inquire into this area during the questioning.
In split decisions on claims involving violations of the civil rights of women, racial minorities, seniors and the disabled, Alito almost uniformly ruled against the claimants.
As America mourns the deaths of the 12 miners in West Virginia, we are reminded of the importance of mine safety regulations. Yet Alito disagreed with the Department of Labor and would not have applied mine safety rules to an area of a defunct Pennsylvania mine from which the company was still extracting materials to process into energy.
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