Wall Street Opinion Journal Peggy Noonan Friday, January 20, 2006
Thoughts on the decline of the liberal media monopoly and the future of the GOP.
I don’t think Democrats understand that the Alito hearings were, for them, not a defeat but an actual disaster. The snarly tone the senators took with a man most Americans could look at and think, “He’s like me,” and the charges they made–You oppose women and minorities, you only like corporations and not the little guy–went nowhere. Once those charges would have taken flight, would have launched, found their target and knocked down any incoming Republican. Not any more. It’s over.
Eleven years ago the Democrats lost control of Congress. Then they lost the presidency. But just as important, maybe more enduringly important, they lost their monopoly on the means of information in America. They lost control of the pipeline. Or rather there are now many pipelines, and many ways to use the information they carry. The other day, Dana Milbank, an important reporter for the Washington Post, the most important newspaper in the capital, wrote a piece deriding Judge Alito. Once such a piece would have been important. Men in the White House would have fretted over its implications. But within hours of filing, Mr. Milbank found his thinking analyzed and dismissed on the Internet; National Review Online called him a “policy bimbo.”
Could Democratic senators today torture Clarence Thomas with tales of Coke cans and porn films? Not likely. Could Ted Kennedy have gotten away with his “Robert Bork’s America” speech unanswered? No.
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Conservative Christians may come to regret the Faustian bargain they have made to support the stacking the Supreme Court with extreme ideolgues in the hope of getting Roe v. Wade reversed.
Roe v Wade may well be reversed, and that would be a good thing, but my conservative Christian friends may also find that they are living in an incipient dictatorship. The Supreme Court they have worked so hard for will have endowed the executive branch with unchecked and unaccountable powers, emasculated the legislative branch leaving it too weak to help Americans in distress, stripped away our civil rights in the national security and given large corporations the freedom to harm and plunder consumers and employees without legal or regulatory constraint.
Judge Alito may be a competent and qualified judge, but he is also a man who demonstrates that it is possible to be well versed in the letter of the law, and completely indifferent to the spirit of the law. Throughout his career on the bench Judge Alito has consistently sided with the strong against the weak, with corporations against plaintiffs, with employers against workers and with the police against the accused. Law Professor Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago has observed the following about Judge Alito:
“Sunstein then raised his concerns about Alitoâ??s voting pattern, which he called â??alarming.â?? Sunstein found that Alito, â??in an overwhelming percentage of cases, is dissenting from the right and rejecting opinions written by Republican nominees. Time and again he is dissenting from the right and very rarely from the left.â?? According to Sunsteinâ??s research, â??There are simply no cases in which Alitoâ??s understanding of the law departs significantly or dramatically from his political convictions.â?? Sunsteinâ??s problem is that Alito does not â??surprise him.â?? He explained that from time to time various conservative judges and justices, like Scalia, Ludwig, Posner, and Wilkinson, will surprise you with opinions that are not aligned with their political convictions, but that is not the case with Alito. According to Sunstein, Alito has â??a [voting] pattern that does not look like anyone us I have seen in the study. A pattern in which his political judgments and legal judgments are stunningly in alignment.â??
http://www.acsblog.org/judicial-nominations-2495-fried-goldstein-and-sunstein-on-the-alito-nomination-and-the-future-of-the-court-and-judical-nominations.html
For me, Judge Alito’s support for the radical doctrine of “Unitary Executive”, which would alter the historic relationship between the branches of government by giving the President the right to disregard laws of Congress and “interpret” laws with the same authority as the Supreme Court, is reason enough to oppose his nomination.
There is nothing “snarly” or “vicious” about attempting to determine whether the ideology of a candidate to the high court is within the mainstream, or so ideological or so extreme or so ill reasoned or so unacceptable in principle, that his presence on the high court represents a threat to our democracy. he Democratic Senators were doing their duty, I only wish they asked togher, sharper questions and were less tolerant of Judgge Alito’s evasive and non-reponsive replies.
Dean writes: “Conservative Christians may come to regret the Faustian bargain they have made to support the stacking the Supreme Court with extreme ideolgues in the hope of getting Roe v. Wade reversed.”
Dean, please. Don’t insult the intelligence of your readers.
The American Bar Association rates Alito “well qualifed” (unanimous with one abstention). The ABA, as I am sure you know, is not known for its conservative leanings.
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Noonan’s point that the way the Democrats behaved (yes behaved, since the spectacle could hardly be called “advise and consent”) in the Alito hearings will come back to haunt them is correct, BTW.
Father: I never questioned Alito’s professional competency, so your reference to his ABA “well qualified” rating is a red herring. The problem with Alito that I noted was the pronounced ideological bias evident in almost all of his rulings and writings as a judge, and his support for the radical “Unitary Executive” doctrine.
Alito conceded during the hearings that “the President isn’t above the law”, but years ago he wrote papers advancing the doctrine of “Unitary Executive” which asserted, that for all practical purposes the President IS the law. The duty to protect the nation during times of war, Alito argued, gives the President the authority to disregard laws that he views as an impediment to attainment of our military objectives.
Already we can see that this doctrine is fraught with potential for abuse and lawless behavior. The Bush administration has asserted this argument to justify transporting prisoners to foreign countries for torture (extraordinary rendition), authorizing methods of torture by US agents that violate the Geneva Convention, establishing offshore concentration camps and holding prisoners there without due process of law, and engaging in domestic wiretapping of US citizens without court order in direct violation of the FISA statutes.
If, as Alito argued, the President has the authority to decide which laws he will follow and which laws he will disregard, then where are the limits to his power? What constitutional barriers are left to stop him, for example, from deciding that people who post messages to internet blogs criticizing the war are “giving comfort to the enemy”, and arresting them and sending to concentration camps and hoding them indefinetely without trial? What is to stop him from deciding that achieving wartime victory requires the nation to have uninterupted presidential leadership and cancelling the next presidential election?
The Senate may reject a nominee if his guiding beliefs and ideological views are extreme, ill-reasoned, or incomptible with our system of government. Alito’s nomination gives us the opportunity to explore whether his doctrine of Unitary Exceutive fits that description. The only way Senate Democrats would have “disgraced themselves” is if instead of asking tough questions, they had behaved like rubber-stamps in a Soviet-era Chamber of People’s Deputies.
Note 3. First Alito is an “extreme ideologue” regarding abortion. That didn’t work so now Alito is an extreme ideologue regarding separation of powers. Then we are told that if the Senate Democrats had responded in any other way, they would have “behaved like rubber-stamps in a Soviet-era Chamber of People’s Deputies.” What’s next?
You call the ABA endorsement a “red herring.” I think it shows that the Progressive critique of Alito is outside of even the liberal mainstream.
I was moved by Ted Kennedy’s concern for women.
Father writes, “the Progressive critique of Alito is outside of even the liberal mainstream.” Today, however, the NY Times calls for the Senate to reject Judge Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court.
“Judge Alito’s Radical Views
..Judge Alito would no doubt try to change the court’s approach. He has supported the fringe “unitary executive” theory, which would give the president greater power to detain Americans and would throw off the checks and balances built into the Constitution. He has also put forth the outlandish idea that if the president makes a statement when he signs a bill into law, a court interpreting the law should give his intent the same weight it gives to Congress’s intent in writing and approving the law.
Judge Alito would also work to reduce Congress’s power in other ways. In a troubling dissent, he argued that Congress exceeded its authority when it passed a law banning machine guns, and as a government lawyer he insisted Congress did not have the power to protect car buyers from falsified odometers.
..Judge Alito has consistently shown a bias in favor of those in power over those who need the law to protect them. Women, racial minorities, the elderly and workers who come to court seeking justice should expect little sympathy. In the same flat bureaucratic tones he used at the hearings, he is likely to insist that the law can do nothing for them.
..The real risk for senators lies not in opposing Judge Alito, but in voting for him. If the far right takes over the Supreme Court, American law and life could change dramatically. If that happens, many senators who voted for Judge Alito will no doubt come to regret that they did not insist that Justice O’Connor’s seat be filled with someone who shared her cautious, centrist approach to the law.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/23/opinion/23mon1.html