Nov 02 2005
Alito Not A True Conservative?
I hate to say “I told you so“, but apparently Bill Kristol, David Frum, George Will and many others in the Anti-Miers crowd have given us someone who, unlike Harriet Miers who opposed abortion on a signed questionnaire, may be another Kennedy/Souter.
On abortion, a nuanced stand
In 3 of 4 cases, Supreme Court nominee Alito voted on the side of abortion rights.
…
For example, of the four abortion cases in which he participated as an appeals court judge, he voted on the pro-choice side in all but one. A 1995 Alito vote striking down a Pennsylvania abortion restriction in particular is raising eyebrows among some legal scholars.
We got Kennedy, Souter and O’Connor by listening to pundits and folks with megaphones who convinced conservative presidents not to try and select nominees based on personal knowledge. The one you know is worse than the one you don’t know (or some such twisted logic). Well, we have now been Soutered again and we can lay the blame at Redstate, NRO and ConfirmThem for freaking out over Miers due to an irrational fear of the unknown.
They will obviously explain, once again, why this subject is too complex for the mere conservative base to grasp. They have once again hoisted some theoretical candidate on us because they saw what they wanted in the opinions – not what was there. And we all were told to be good little conservatives and follow the true conservative voices (no matter the size of misjudgements and errors these folks have piled up in the past).
Oh, well. Maybe on the next nomination.
Those four cases do NOT include the multiple immigration asylum cases he decided involving Chinese women or their husbands/boyfriends who were threatened with deportation but claimed asylum because of persecution due to China’s forced abortion policies. In many of those cases, Alito told them, “tough luck” and refused to give them relief.
Ed Whelan at NRO corrects himself —
“This Washington Post story on how Judge Alito might approach Roe closes with this quote from me: ‘someone who’s shown the high-quality judging Alito has and is not ideologically driven to the left will of course recognize that Roe is an abomination that has distorted American politics for 30 years.’ The quote is entirely accurate, but I did not speak as precisely as I should have. In particular, I should have said something like “should clearly recognize†instead of “will of course recognize.†Making predictions with seeming certainty on this or any other contested issue as to any Supreme Court nominee is presumptuous and unwarranted.”
Well, thank you for making it clear that your claim that he “will of course” reverse Roe has absolutely no foundation in fact, and that he merely “should clearly” do so, and then qualifying your arbitrary statement even more by saying it would be “presumptuous and unwarranted” to make any predictions in this area. In other words, you have absolutely no confidence whatsoever that he will reverse Roe, and you concede that it is possible, even likely that he will reaffirm, especially since Casey has already conceded that Roe lacks any merit, but it should be followed on stare decisis grounds, which is the epitome of “conservative” jurisprudence.
Thanks a hell of a lot you @#%&* — you exchange a probable anti-Roe vote for a pro-Roe vote (or at least pro-Casey) merely because you consider the process of deciding (intellectual) more important than the outcome, because you believe that a lawyer from a non-elite school is unqualified for anything. I’ve got news for you asshats — Roe wasn’t wrong (merely) because it was poorly reasoned or because it was an “exercise in raw judicial power,” but because 45,000,000 innocent human beings are dead because of it! Nevertheless, Alito’s “judicial conservativism” may well lead him to conclude that, whatever the original merits of Roe, it has been the law for too long and respect for stare decisis requires that it be upheld.
http://bench.nationalreview.com/archives/whelan/
I hate to sound like a broken record, but if judges insist on being politicians, we’ll continue to have this problem, unles we START ELECTING OUR JUDGES!!!