[Mb-civic] A Right Cautious Nominee - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

A Right Cautious Nominee
Measured Replies Paint Picture With a Conservative Tint

By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 13, 2006; A06

Samuel A. Alito Jr. did everything he could do to avoid saying how he 
would rule on the big issues that might come before the Supreme Court 
if, as now seems likely, he is confirmed by the Senate and succeeds 
Sandra Day O'Connor.

Yet even his cautious answers to questions from the Senate Judiciary 
Committee contained evidence that the court could shift to the right 
once the federal appellate judge takes O'Connor's seat.

Though he distanced himself from his youthful expressions of support for 
the conservative Concerned Alumni of Princeton and the ill-fated 
nomination of Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987, Alito, 55, 
stood by the generally conservative opinions he has written as an 
appellate judge. When Democrats repeatedly sought to portray those 
decisions as insensitive to the rights and concerns of minorities or 
working-class people, Alito explained why he thought the law had 
required him to rule as he did.

And when Alito described his personal history, his comments revealed a 
man whose conservatism developed not only in the cool corridors of a law 
library but also in the heated backlash against the perceived excesses 
of 1960s and 1970s liberalism.

Alito could thus form a relatively solid conservative bloc with Chief 
Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence 
Thomas. The court has four liberal-leaning members: Justices John Paul 
Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.

That would leave Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, an appointee of President 
Ronald Reagan, as the swing voter. Kennedy has compiled a record of 
conservatism punctuated by votes in favor of gay rights and reaffirming 
Roe v. Wade.

"Both Alito and Roberts fall closer to Scalia and Thomas than they do to 
O'Connor," said David J. Garrow, a Supreme Court historian at Cambridge 
University in England.

Many of the issues that dominated the hearings are already on the 
court's agenda, or could be soon. One abortion case has been argued 
during the current term, but no decision has been issued; a case on the 
federal "partial birth" abortion ban is pending. If, as expected, Alito 
is sworn in by February, he could well be asked to participate in both 
of them.

Also, the court has been asked to rule on military trials for detainees 
at Guantanamo Bay and on President Bush's detention of a U.S. citizen, 
Jose Padilla, as an "enemy combatant." The court has not decided whether 
to take the cases.

Alito's arrival on the Supreme Court would mean that, in place of a 
75-year-old Western woman who grew up on a cattle ranch, met with gender 
discrimination in her first job search, and then served as a state 
legislator and trial court judge, the court will be adding a white 
ethnic male from the industrial Northeast who has spent the past 15 
years in the wonkish world of the federal appellate bench.

There would still be at least five justices on the court who favor Roe . 
But whereas O'Connor's pragmatic concerns about possible social unrest 
and harm to women from undoing Roe v. Wade trumped her doubts about the 
decision's constitutional validity, Alito is still a question mark on 
abortion rights. He acknowledges that he opposed Roe in the past, but he 
has compiled a mixed record on abortion as a judge and pledged to 
approach the issue with an "open mind" and full respect for the Roe 
precedent.

Alito's answers on Roe left him as much wiggle room as the slightly 
differently worded statements Roberts made at his confirmation hearings, 
said John Q. Barrett, a professor of constitutional law at St. John's 
University. "Neither one," Barrett said, "made a commitment . . . to any 
particular version of abortion rights."

O'Connor's conservatism, with its accent on states' rights, is rooted in 
the Western Sagebrush Rebellion against Washington. Alito's seems to 
have originated at least in part in the backlash against liberalism in 
Ivy League universities.

In his opening statement, Alito -- like Scalia, the son of an 
intellectually gifted Italian American -- spoke in a voice no less 
intelligent than, but culturally distinct from, that of Roberts, the 
private-school-educated son of a Midwestern steel executive.

Indeed, Alito sounded a bit like one of the millions of culturally 
conservative urban ethnic voters who deserted the Democratic Party in 
favor of Reagan after the upheaval of the 1960s.

As a public high school product on Princeton's campus in the late 1960s 
and early '70s, Alito said, "I saw some very smart people and very 
privileged people behaving irresponsibly. And I couldn't help making a 
contrast between some of the worst of what I saw on the campus, and the 
good sense and the decency of the people back in my own community."

In terms that still evinced some of the dismay he must have felt at the 
time, Alito spoke of his concern over the expulsion of his ROTC unit 
from Princeton, which forced him to take his military classes at Trenton 
State. That "bothered me for a long time," he said. It was "a very bad 
thing for Princeton to do."

The hearings showed that Alito's involvement in the conservative 
Concerned Alumni of Princeton was peripheral to his career -- but that 
perhaps the feelings that drove him to affiliate with it, however 
superficially, were not.

His lingering unhappiness about the "bad" decisions made by his 
prestigious alma mater contrasts with the attitude O'Connor showed 
toward elite schools and their leaders in 2003, when she cast the 
deciding vote to uphold affirmative action in higher education.

"Our holding today is in keeping with our tradition of giving a degree 
of deference to a university's academic decisions," she wrote. Her 
opinion approvingly cited a pro-affirmative-action book co-written by 
William G. Bowen, who was provost of Princeton during Alito's student 
years and was the school's president at the time CAP was formed.

Asked about his reference to "traditional values" in a 1985 job 
application letter to Attorney General Edwin I. Meese III, Alito replied 
in terms that again idealized the safe streets of his boyhood.

"I think a traditional value that I probably had in mind was the ability 
to live in peace and safety in your neighborhood," the former federal 
prosecutor said. "And that was a big issue during the time of the Warren 
court, and it was still a big issue in 1985 when I wrote that statement 
because that was a time of very high crime rates. I think that's a 
traditional value."

Still, like Roberts, Alito did not embrace some of the most 
controversial legal views of Scalia and Thomas.

Scalia has said that the Supreme Court should interpret only the literal 
text of statutes and the Constitution, and not search historical records 
for evidence of their authors' intent.

But Alito said: "I'm not one of the judges who thinks that . . . you 
should never look to legislative history. I think it has its place."

And Alito put much greater emphasis on precedent than does Thomas, who 
has called for overruling decisions that clash with his view of the 
Constitution's literal meaning.

Stare decisis , the notion that past decisions generally should be 
followed to avoid legal instability, "is not an inexorable command," 
Alito said. But long-standing decisions such as Roe should not be 
overturned absent some "special justification," he said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/12/AR2006011202015.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060113/ca30ccf3/attachment.htm