[Mb-civic] The Company Man - David S. Broder - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

The Company Man

By David S. Broder
Sunday, January 15, 2006; B07

President Bush is getting what he wants in the Supreme Court nomination 
of Judge Samuel Alito. The designated successor to Justice Sandra Day 
O'Connor emerged from the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings as the 
perfect company man who is likely to deliver exactly the kind of 
conservative rulings Bush prefers.

Last week's hearings reaffirmed Alito's 15-year record on the 
Philadelphia-based U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit. He 
will construe the Constitution and statutes narrowly, and sometimes 
literally, and waste no sympathy on people who come to court hoping for 
a more expansive or generous interpretation of their rights.

Thanks to a misdirected Democratic attack, Alito moved to the brink of 
confirmation without having to repudiate or modify the views on abortion 
or executive power that endeared him to Bush and the conservative 
movement. He will almost certainly move the Supreme Court to the right.

The man we saw in the witness chair over three days was exactly as 
advertised. He is a highly intelligent legal craftsman thoroughly 
schooled in Supreme Court precedents. He should be able to hit the 
ground running for the remaining months of the current court term.

What we did not see was the rich appreciation of American history and 
tradition that illuminated Chief Justice John Roberts's commentary on 
legal issues when he was before the Judiciary Committee a few months 
ago. Where Roberts appeared to be enjoying his repartee with the 
senators, Alito approached the hearings with a grim, thin-lipped 
stoicism -- as an ordeal he was determined to endure.

Whatever slim chance the Democrats had of defeating his nomination -- 
and it was never really plausible -- disappeared on the second day of 
questioning, when the liberals focused on Alito's membership in that 
controversial Princeton University alumni organization and on his 
failing to recuse himself in a case involving the Vanguard investment firm.

By shifting the focus from his judicial philosophy to his character, the 
Democrats set up Alito to play to his strength.

However aggrieved Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) felt about Alito's 
forgetting his promise to recuse himself on any matters involving 
Vanguard, where the judge had an investment account, the implicit 
suggestion that Alito had a financial conflict of interest was exactly 
what the judge called it -- "preposterous."

Similarly, it was a reach by Kennedy and others to tar Alito with the 
obnoxious anti-black and anti-woman views expressed by some in the 
Concerned Alumni of Princeton organization he had listed on a 
20-year-old résumé.

No one who has read any of the endorsements of his character from dozens 
of his associates is going to believe that Alito is a crook or a bigot. 
When Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) expressed his outrage at the 
suggestion and the nominee's wife burst into tears, Alito became the 
sympathetic character in this drama.

And therein lies the irony of this hearing. At no point that I heard did 
Alito express sympathy for the men and women who came to his court 
looking for help -- and were turned away. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) 
asked him about some of those people.

One was a black man convicted of murder by an all-white jury sitting in 
a courtroom where local prosecutors had eliminated all African American 
jurors in five consecutive murder trials in the space of a year. Alito, 
dissenting from a verdict overturning the conviction, wrote that the 
makeup of the jury was no more significant than the fact that "Although 
only about 10 [percent] of the population is left-handed, left-handers 
have won five of the last six presidential elections."

Durbin asked why he had used an analogy that his fellow judges had 
called totally inappropriate and suggestive of a disregard of "the 
history of discrimination against prospective black jurors and black 
defendants."

Alito responded, "Well, the analogy . . . went to the issue of 
statistics and the use and misuse of statistics, and the fact that 
statistics can be quite misleading . . . that's what that was referring 
to. There's a whole -- statistics is a branch of mathematics, and there 
are ways to analyze statistics so that you draw sound conclusions from 
them and avoid erroneous conclusions from them."

That perfectly bureaucratic response betrays not the slightest doubt 
about the human consequences of his reasoning.

Durbin cited other examples, including the mentally retarded man who was 
harassed and almost raped by other workers, and whom Alito denied a new 
trial because of the inadequacies of his lawyer's brief. And the same 
narrow construction led to other Alito dissents in cases of mine safety 
and environmental protection.

To be sure, Alito was able to cite decisions in which he ruled for 
individuals and against the government. But the pattern of his 
jurisprudence -- and the workings of his mind -- show Bush is going to 
get exactly what he wants from his latest Supreme Court pick: a company man.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/13/AR2006011301695.html?nav=hcmodule
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