Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Bush and Alito
In his speech today at the Veterans of Foreign Wars President Bush railed against “irresponsible debate.”
This on the heels of a Congressional Research Service report maintaining that the president’s wiretapping was probably illegal.
Fascism doesn’t get much more plain than this. Illegal spying. The discouragement of dissent. This president is so far beyond the pale that he is almost a caricature of a republican dictator.
Unfortunately, he is not a caricature. He has real support. Sen. Coburn of Oklahoma on Bill Bennett’s show this morning flat-out denied that there were provisions in FISA that allow the president to receive warrant approval after the fact. He said (paraphrasing) “sometimes these wiretapping requests take 48 hours or more for approval. What is the president supposed to do when he needs a warrant within minutes?”
As anyone who has been paying any attention to the news knows, FISA allows the Executive to receive wiretapping warrants up to 72 hours after the tap has already been placed. Coburn’s assertion is a flat-out lie.
But what do you expect from a senator who was one of only nine to vote against the anti-torture McCain Amendment?
Alito
Let me first say I have a great deal of respect for Judge Alito’s career and opinions. Despite this, he has issues in his past.
Alito, in the seventies, joined the Concerned Alumni if Princeton. He later, in 1985, placed this on his resume, ostensibly as a point of pride. He had a reason to, at least in the era of Ronald Reagan: CAP was a conservative organization. The problem with the CAP is that a large portion of its agenda was restoring Princeton’s old standards of admission and cultural and racial identity. CAP writings evince undisguised hostility to the admission of minorities and women.
Alito, under questioning yesterday, had “no specific recollection” of the CAP. I find this answer disingenuous. He had enough of a memory of it in his twenties and thirties to consider it a point of pride.
The CAP, granted, is an old issue. Some of his rulings are not. In the U.S. v. Rybar, Alito dissented from the majority in stating that Congress had no right to ban fully automatic weapons under their constitutional power to regulate interstate trade. This is a curious dissent: the broad authority of congress to regulate this trade is the only thing that underpins federal drug and gun control legislation. Courts across this nation for generations have upheld this standard. While I’m not a legal expert, I’m not the only one perplexed by this judgment.
Alito again dissented in Doe. V. Groody, when he ruled that police, who had strip-searched a ten-year-old girl, had the right to do so in their warrant to search a drug den (pardon the colloquial language). Alito was concerned that if his court set a precedent than drug dealers around the country would use ten year olds as mules. While he expressed distaste for the situation, he nevertheless sided with the police. Alito, along with many conservative Americans, believes that the quest for drugs trumps the privacy rights of children.
This is but a sampling. Alito has a long history of conservative rulings. He was promoted to the Circuit Court by George H.W. Bush and nominated for the Supreme Court by George W. Bush. No one denies that Alito is a staunch conservative.
I wouldn’t want Alito to become the fifth conservative on the court. His artful refusal to give opinions regarding such things as the president’s wiretapping don’t make me any more confident in his judgment. Many say that the committee’s hearings are a show as the senators have already made up their minds. That may be not such a bad thing. Alito’s record speaks louder than words.
His defenders point out instances of Alito siding with “the little guy,” minorities, and others. I don’t doubt that he has. But do we want the dissenter in Rybar to be a Supreme Court Justice?
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 4:11 PM 
