2008 Woodie Awards
The vast majority of Alito coverage, at least from me, will be here, instead of on this blog.
From CampusProgress.org:
Sam Alito’s opinions as a judge should be enough to make mainstream Americans call their Senators and demand the rejection of this radical, extremist nominee. However, as Senator Kennedy makes clear today in the Washington Post, while Alito’s views are disturbing in themselves, the basic ethical questions surrounding Alito should make us sincerely question whether he has the integrity to occupy the distinguished office of Supreme Court justice. Why didn’t he recuse himself from cases involving Vanguard mutual funds, in which he holds large investments, that came before the Third Circuit, when he told the Judiciary Committee in 1990 that he would? Is he truly capable of applying the law impartially when his record on the Third Circuit reveals him to be a hard-right ideologue?
These ethical questions are very disturbing. It would be in the best interests of the process for the President to withdraw Alito and put forth a mainstream candidate with a record of personal conduct that doesn’t raise eyebrows. Since this President isn’t likely to do that, the Senate must prompt him by voting down Alito. Senators who don’t- I’m looking at you, Olympia Snowe, Arlen Specter, Susan Collins, Chuck Hagel, and other so-called ‘moderate Republicans’- should be held accountable when they come up for reelection.
It appears that Richard Posner is not simply a bad media critic; he’s also has very strange ideas about the Fourth Amendment.
See Eyal Press’ article in The Nation (I had a very minor hand).
Professor Emeritus Walter Murphy, on returning Alito’s senior thesis to Mudd:
“We, however, agree on other important issues, such as finding no constitutional barrier to bans on late term abortions and requiring spousal and parental notification of impending abortions.”
Murphy said that because the Supreme Court regularly makes “critically important decisions that affect public policy in the United States … it’s perfectly proper to ask questions of a nominee what he or she thinks of these issues.”
Good.
College Republican in today’s Daily Princetonian:
Senators will have the opportunity to examine a formidable paper trail in the coming months, but Judge Alito’s record is unlikely to reveal any of the “radical” decisions of which he has been accused. Rather, the nominee’s work will show that he is a considerate, mainstream jurist who takes a restrained view of the role of the judiciary and applies the law strictly in court decisions.
vs.
RUSSERT: Do you believe Congress has the right to restrict the sale and transfer of machine guns or do you think that Judge Alito is correct that Congress should not be interfering in that?
SEN. TOM COBURN (R-OK): No, I think we probably have the right to do it. But I don’t think a judge has the right. That brings us back to the whole point. Those aren’t decisions judges should be making. Those are decisions legislatures should be making. That’s how we’ve gotten off on this track that we allowed judges to start deciding the law, new law, rather than interpret the law that the Congress — what should have napped this case is this is an area that’s up for debate and needs to go back to Congress. And if Congress decides that, then it should be there.
RUSSERT: So Judge Alito was wrong?
COBURN: Sure.
RUSSERT: And he was legislating?
COBURN: Sure.
- Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) on Meet the Press yesterday.
So much for Alito’s “restrained view of the role of the judiciary.”
that (a) I do not support the nomination of Sam Alito; (b) I wish Sam Alito’s nomination gets filibustered by the Dems (even though that won’t happen). Thanks to Bush for nominating a Princetonian so we have something to pontificate about around these parts. But I should be clear: I do not support Alito’s nomination, and I’m quite sure that a Justice Alito would be bad for the country.
Just had to clear that up.
There’s been some noise made about the report of a committee Alito chaired while an undergrad at Princeton that urged protection for the personal privacy of individuals. The report argues that “the judiciary should be entrusted with preventing abuses” of the administrative search power that the Court had upheld as constitutional in the 1967 Camara case. It goes on to argue that “it is . . . quite wrong for military intelligence to get deeply involved in domestic surveillance.” It also urges overturning sodomy laws in place at the time that discriminated against gays, and said that “discrimination against homosexuals in hiring should be forbidden.”
My thinking is that this was a policy document Alito helped write in a Woodrow Wilson School task force (the Globe story suggests that he wrote it himself, or at least the interesting parts himself, but that’s really not clear from the document). That tells you several things: (1) this was not his personal view, but instead the result of a give-and-take between all the students in the course; (2) we shouldn’t take this as indicative of what he actually thought at the time; (3) we definitely shouldn’t take this as indicative of anything Alito believes now. I’m more inclined to believe Jonathan Turley’s analysis of Alito’s views on privacy.
Some clarifications from this story in the Prince. Still doesn’t explain why it’s missing. He was on ROTC, which I take to indicate that he probably thinks the Solomon Amendment is constitutional. This is important because there’s a case pending before the Court on this issue (Fair v. Rumsfeld) that’s going to be argued in December. You figure that Alito could probably make it onto the Court in time to rule on this case. The issue in FAIR is whether the Solomon Amendment violates the First Amendment by conditioning federal funds to universities based on its members’ support of military recruitment on campus (thorough ROTC programs), even though such recruitment blatantly excludes openly gay, lesbian and bisexual law students (and thus contradicts university non-discrimination policies). Based on his biography, I would think that Alito would rule in favor of the defendent here and uphold the Solomon Amendment’s constitutionality.
So, here’s what I know about Alito. He was a really, really good student at Princeton, says a well-placed source. “At the top of his class.” He’d be the 9th Princetonian on the Court.
Still, we don’t know what his senior thesis was on, or when it went missing from Mudd Library.
Just another WordPress weblog
RSS 2.0
