Alito appointment to the Supreme Court would be a travesty for women, minorities, and anyone who desires a society where women and minorities are treated equally.
Alito's views are very radical and far outside the judicial mainstream, and his legal history demonstrates a pattern of judicial activism where Alito has repeatedly chosen to ignore decades of prior court decisions to reach his own politically-motivated result. For example, the scope of congressional authority to regulate nationwide solutions for nationwide problems is an issue that was decided about 70 years ago. But Alito would ignore these past 70 years and thousands of well-decided legal precedents to re-open this settled legal matter because it does not suit his personal philosophy. Most significantly, Alito's radically narrow pre-1937 view of congressional authority puts him at odds with the legal underpinning for most labor regulations assuring racial and gender equality in the workplace. As part of his extremist pro-corporate/anti-equality-regulation beliefs, Alito would make it nearly impossible to police corporate discrimination if the law was allowed to follow Alito's dissenting views in Sheridan v. Dupont, 74 F.3d 1439 (3d Cir. 1996), and Bray v. Marriott Hotels, 110 F.3d 986 (3d Cir. 1997).
The same out-of-the-mainstream view of congressional authority was at the heart of Alito's poor decision to rule that Congress did not have the authority to require state employers to comply with the Family Medical Leave Act in Chittister v. Department of Community and Economic Development. The Supreme Court was there to keep Alito's judicial activism in check by overruling his radical views against the congressional power to enforce the Family Medical Leave Act across the nation, but there would be no higher court to check his extremism if Alito was promoted to the Supreme Court.
The same judicial arrogance lies at the heart of Alito's dissenting opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 947 F.2d 682 (3d Cir. 1991), where he once again demonstrated his willingness to ignore several decades of well-established judicial precedents to re-write the accepted view of the Constitution simply because his personal philosophy runs contrary to the established rule of law. Even Alito's Republican colleagues on the court of appeals disagreed with his judicial activism and the Republican-dominated Supreme Court again rejected his radical view.
In Alito's dissenting opinion in United States v. Rybar, 103 F.3d 273 (3d Cir. 1996), is yet one more example of Alito's willingness to ignore 70 years of judicial precedents to reach the extremist ruling that Congress does not have the authority to regulate the ownership of submachine guns. Again, even Alito's Republican colleagues on the court of appeals disagreed with this type of judicial activism and the Republican-dominated Supreme Court also rejected Alito's radical view.
If anyone was left to wonder whether Alito's out-of-the-mainstream decisions are the result of his personal views, this issue was recently resolved by the uncovering of Alito's application to work for Reagan administration Attorney General Ed Meese. In Alito’s statement of his radical right-wing judicial philosophy, Alito admitted he has a personal "disagreement with Warren Court decisions, particularly in the areas of criminal procedure, the Establishment Clause, and reapportionment" and he was "particularly proud" of his work arguing "that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion." When Alito confessed that he disagrees with the Supreme Court’s decision regarding reapportionment, he was principally referring to Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sims, two critical decisions which rejected racial vote dilution in favor of the one-man-one-vote principle under the equal protection guarantees of the Constitution. Everyone in America should have the gravest concern about Alito’s eagerness to disagree with over 40 years of Supreme Court precedents establishing equal protection at the nation’s ballot boxes.
In his craven job application with Meese, Alito brags about his founding member status in "the Concerned Alumni of Princeton University." Princeton's own newspaper described this radical group as "a far-right organization funded by conservative alumni committed to turning back the clock on coeducation at the University." See <
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2005/11/18/news/13876.shtml>. Even other far-right Republican Princeton alumni like Sen. Bill Frist agree "that Concerned Alumni had 'presented a distorted, narrow and hostile view of the university that cannot help but have misinformed and even alarmed many alumni' and 'undoubtedly generated adverse national publicity.'" Shortly after Alito joined the Concerned Alumni of Princeton, its executive committee published a statement advocating exclusion of women in higher education: "Concerned Alumni of Princeton opposes adoption of a sex-blind admission policy." Concerned Alumni of Princeton was equally disgraceful in its disrespect of minority students. Just two years before Alito bragged of his membership in the group to Ed Meese, Concerned Alumni of Princeton published "In Defense of Elitism," an essay which argued that "People nowadays just don't seem to know their place.... Everywhere one turns blacks and hispanics are demanding jobs simply because they're black and hispanic, the physically handicapped are trying to gain equal representation in professional sports, and homosexuals are demanding that government vouchsafe them the right to bear children."
Clearly, Alito's radical judicial opinions against the congressional authority, against women's and minorities' rights, and against policing corporate discrimination are motivated by his extremist views.
If Alito's extreme judicial activism weren't enough grounds to oppose his nomination, Alito also has a history of ethical violations and misleading Congress. In 1990, when Alito was seeking US Senate approval for his nomination to be an appeals court judge, he was asked to answer the same questions that other judicial nominees are asked in written questionnaire. Specifically, Alito was asked how he would resolve potential conflicts of interest, and he responded: "I do not believe that conflicts of interest relating to my financial interests are likely to arise. I would, however, disqualify myself from any cases involving the Vanguard companies." When a Vanguard case later came before Alito he did not disqualify himself as he promised Congress he would; instead, he broke the promise to Congress and ruled in favor of Vanguard without ever disclosing his ownership of approximately a half million to a million dollars in Vanguard.
Alito's failure to disclose this obvious conflict of interest and his failure to disqualify himself puts Alito in an extreme fringe of judges who take an out-of-the-mainstream lax view of the judicial ethics rules. However, Alito's failure to disqualify himself in violation of his express contrary promise to Congress puts Alito in an bad ethics category all by himself: before Alito there was no prior history of judges failing to disclose conflicts of interest and then also failing to disqualify themselves in situations where they had previously acknowledged the specific conflict and then promised Congress to disqualify themselves. Alito's ethical breach is an extreme one-of-a-kind breach of judicial ethics.
As a final note, never believe the Republican effort to rewrite congressional history regarding the filibuster of judicial nominees and the Supreme Court. In 1965, the Senate easily confirmed Judge Abe Fortas to the Supreme Court. Just three years later, when President Lyndon Johnson nominated Fortas to serve as Chief Justice, there was obviously no question about his qualifications because Fortas was already serving on the Supreme Court. Based only on Fortas's judicial views, however, the Senate Republicans launched a successful four-day filibuster of Fortas's nomination in September of 1968. Whenever you hear some Senator saying that there is no history of filibustering a Supreme Court nomination based on his out-of-the-mainstream judicial views, ask them to look up the front page of the Washington Post from September 26, 1968: "A full-dress Republican-led filibuster broke out in the Senate yesterday against a motion to call up the nomination of Justice Abe Fortas for Chief Justice." The New York Times ran as similar story that day, and many news outlets around ran the story later that week.
Alito must not be confirmed, and if necessary, his nomination must be filibustered. Please tell your Senators.
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