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31.10.2005

Bush nominates Samuel Alito for Supreme Court

Tags: Uncategorized — Author: @ 4:35 pm
 

Bush picks another conservative to replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor…

So consistently conservative, Alito has been dubbed “Scalito” or “Scalia-lite” by some lawyers because his judicial philosophy invites comparisons to conservative Supreme Court Justice
Antonin Scalia. But while Scalia is outspoken and is known to badger lawyers, Alito is polite, reserved and even-tempered.

[...]In the early 1990s, Alito was the lone dissenter in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a case in which the 3rd Circuit struck down a Pennsylvania law that included a provision requiring women seeking abortions to notify their spouses.

…ew, I don’t like this guy already!

  • Walter

    ” provision requiring women seeking abortions to notify their spouses.”

    Apparently there is a problem with women secretly getting pregnant behind their husbands back?

  • Monkey

    Uh, so, it’s a bad thing if a woman tells her husband she’s going to have an abortion?
    Cause she made that baby all by herself?

  • Helsinkian

    Check out this Liberal reaction to the President’s choice of “Scalito”:

    http://billmon.org/archives/002320.html

  • Helsinkian

    BlogPAC are pretty slow in getting their anti-Scalito website going, maybe it’s for the lack of donations as yet:

    http://scalito.com

  • Jormanen

    Phil, You were right about Harriet Miers. Congrats!

  • Helsinkian

    I think it was generous of the President to offer someone, Harriet Miers, who would not have actualized the boring filibuster debate in the Senate. Sure she’s a Conservative but regardless of her lack of experience she would have been moderate enough to even take the place of Sandra Day O’Connor as a balancing act on the Court. The appointment of Miers would not have tilted the balance of the Court decisively in favor of the religious right. This is exactly why the religious right were up in arms against her. Bush who is loyal to his friends was ready to defend her. The religious right would not have cared about her job experience had they felt her religious credentials were foolproof.

    Miers left a bad impression on the social conservatives but Alito’s religious credentials are to the taste of even the more extreme among the religious right. That he’s experienced and articulate and ready to drive through the Christian agenda in the court makes the situation even doubly more juicy from a Christian Nation perspective.

    The Democrats counted that they added to the force of the religious right had the votes to “Bork” Miers (Christian Conservative Robert Bork was blocked by the Democrats in 1987 with the help of moderate Republicans). They forgot that they can only block nominations with the help of the Christian Right but they can never, ever unify with them on a common candidate to the Court. The rest of the Republican Party, on the other hand, vote against the Christian Right only in that rare occasion when the President is on their side. Now that the President chose to pick the darling of the religious right, he will automatically get the Republican majority in the Senate behind Alito.

    For the Dems the defeat of the religious right in the SCOTUS issue was the only feasible outcome, since they do care about the right to privacy. The only way to do that would have been for Democratic Senators to go with Bush and confirm Miers regardless of her downsides. Yes it is extraordinary to appoint someone who is not a judge but it is not unconstitutional. Appointing judges is nowadays the rule but not so in the past. It was not conclusively proven that Miers is a bad lawyer to begin with. Anyway, she was a secular lawyer. Alito is more likely to prefer the word of the Bible to the word of the Constitution, if any conflict should arise.

    Getting Miers replaced by Alito was the biggest triumph of the religious right so far. With the help of the Democratic Party they defeated the President who thought he was actually pleasing the majority of the people of the United States by NOT appointing a Scalia clone, how much he had in his campaign rhetoric underlined that he prefers such a candidate above all else.

    The decision to appoint Alito makes the wise words of former Senator John Danforth, a Christian priest himself, ring all the more true:

    http://www.republicanmainstreet.org/News/154.htm

  • http://finnpundit.blogspot.com Finnpundit

    Your analysis is pretty much on the mark. I feel that the initial negative Democratic reaction to Miers was quite foolish; they should have listened closely to the rumbles coming from the religious right. That was a clue if there ever was any.

    The knee-jerk stance of the Democrats – that anything that Bush does will be wrong – has seriously injured their cause. This is one of the reasons I left the Democratic Party. In the eighties, Reagan used to worry me more than Bush does today… until the Soviet Union collapsed, which caused me to reassess the effects of American politics. The anti-Reagan reaction was pretty much the same knee-jerk reaction we see today in Democrats. The party simply reacts, and offers old ideas based on old ideologies.

    Clinton was a surprise, and a reassurance. I was definitely pro-Clinton. However, the lesson of that era is that even with a benign internationalist like Clinton, anti-American bigotry all over the world will not change. So it really doesn’t matter which party’s candidate becomes president, as long as he is not weak, and is not afraid to use power when it needs to be used. That was the main reason I voted against John Kerry: he was too much in line with European thinking.

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  • http://www.google.com/ tihopilik

    Hello

    I can’t be bothered with anything these days, but shrug. I just don’t have anything to say recently.

    Bye

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