The Alito Sham

Not much that comes from The Regime is to be trusted-- perhaps nothing.

Dahlia Lithwick's column in Slate today, "Sam's Club: Why Alito's Membership in CAP Matters", indicates how this suppression of truth is working in the candidacy of Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court and the ongoing Senate comfirmation hearings. Writing about the forgotten (or is it?) membership in that disreputable club at Princeton, which Alito remembered enough to put on his resume once upon a time, she says:

. . . CAP was code in 1985 for all the things Alito refused to write on his application and refuses to discuss before the committee now. Instead of being forthright about his convictions, Alito hides behind the fiction that there is only one way to decide cases. Instead of proudly bearing witness—as he has done throughout his career—to his opposition to the Warren Court's rulings, his disdain for the reasoning in Roe, his preference for states' rights, strong police powers, and "traditional values"—he pretends that all those amassed thoughts and ideas are irrelevant. He pretends—as do his supporters in the GOP—that every one of those thoughts has absolutely no
bearing on how he decides cases. And that is just not true.

I (liberal that I am) support abortion rights and appropriate limits on police powers, among other things: these things alone cause me not to want to see Alito posted to the Supreme Court. And these are the very reasons that conservatives want to see him there. We all know he has particular biases in these matters.

What concerns me even more deeply are Alito's statements, on the record, that support el Presidente's arrogation of power to his benighted office (warrantless surveillance, de facto repudiation of Congressional authority when it suits [as in the McCain anti-torture amendment] and so forth). Could there possibly be a more blindingly wrong time to put this man in that office for life? Are we really intending to go the way of Somoza's Nicaragua? (I know: "Duh!")

Why can't even a Senator Kennedy talk about this openly? Why the sham? Alito was chosen for his politics, for his not all that obscure record, for the very, um, qualities of Princeton's CAP that at least once upon a time appealed to him. If he can't be voted down, his candidacy should be filibustered: for the sake of this democracy, for the sake of the "original intent"(!) of the framers of the Consitution regarding the separation of powers, for the sake of the 49.5% of the population (at least) that did NOT vote to put GW in office. The extremism must be stopped.