Paul Rogat Loeb
January 04, 2006
... www.paulloeb.org
... Consistently opposing the federal government's right to address corporate abuses, Alito has argued for virtually unlimited executive power, including the government's right to intervene in the most intimate realms of personal life. He's endorsed the rights of police to shoot an unarmed 15-year-old who was fleeing after breaking into a house, defended the refusal of state employers to pay damages for violating the Family and Medical Leave Act and said it created no undue burden if husbands could prevent their wives from getting abortions. Citizen groups, he's ruled, have no standing to sue convicted polluters under the Clean Water Act. The federal government, he's argued, has no right to pass national consumer protection legislation aimed at preventing odometer fraud or banning the sales of machine guns. Regarding the exclusion of blacks from juries in death penalty cases, he's called the statistical evidence as inconsequential as the disproportionate number of recent U.S. presidents who've been left-handed. In one case, Alito's Third Circuit colleagues said the federal law prohibiting employment discrimination "would be eviscerated if our analysis were to halt where
suggests."
Alito now downplays his membership in a Princeton alumni group so hostile to the admission of women and minorities that even Senate Majority Leader Frist condemned it. He dismisses as mere job-seeking his declarations, while applying to the Reagan-era Justice Department, that the Constitution does not protect a woman's right to choose an abortion and that he disagreed with the Warren Court rulings that desegregated schools and expanded voting rights. He's trying to dismiss he memo he wrote, after getting the job, embracing the "goals of bringing about the eventual overturning of Roe v. Wade ." He also minimizes the breaking of his pledge to recuse himself from cases involving his sister's law firm.
It's precisely because Alito's presence on the court is so potentially damaging that Democrats and moderate Republicans have a responsibility to challenge his nomination through every possible mechanism, including the filibuster. Republican leaders who try to eliminate it as a political option need to be branded, along with every senator who supports them, as embodying a politics that believes in nothing except its own right to power. With Roberts, senators could say they were replacing the equally conservative William Rehnquist. To support Alito, we need to make clear, is to alter the balance on the court radically for the most dubious of political ends. It does no good to reserve the right to filibuster in theory. If our senators aren't willing to risk using it in a situation this exceptional, it becomes practically meaningless ...
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20060104/alito_and_the_f_word.php
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