Gearing Up for the Alito Confirmation Hearings: Alito in the Press

Here's a very unscientific sampling of what's been published today.
(I've also included a couple of items published last week.)

Editorials

New York Times: Judging Samuel Alito

Judge Alito's confirmation hearings begin tomorrow. He may be able to use them to reassure the Senate that he will be respectful of rights that Americans cherish, but he has a lengthy and often troubling record he will have to explain away. As a government lawyer, he worked to overturn Roe v. Wade. He has disturbing beliefs on presidential power - a critical issue for the country right now. He has worked to sharply curtail Congress's power to pass laws and protect Americans. He may not even believe in "one person one vote."

Washinton Post: Judge Alito Dissenting (Jan. 6, 2006)

You can learn a lot about a judge by the circumstances in which he cannot agree with his colleagues. Consequently, the many dissents of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. offer an unusual window into his judicial personality. In political terms, a preponderance of them are ideologically predictable -- that is, there are many cases in which Judge Alito takes an approach that would yield results more conservative than those reached by his colleagues and few in which he dissents from the left. In legal terms, his work is careful and measured, and while we disagree with his analysis in some cases, in others it seems admirable.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Alito Nomination: Time isn't right

In another time, with a different president, under slightly changed circumstances, Judge Samuel Alito might make a fine addition to the U.S. Supreme Court. But there is too much at stake for him to be confirmed now.

OpEdNews.com: Alito's Extraordinary Circumstances by Paul Rogat Loeb

Senators accept a president's court nominations for three reasons: They respect the perspectives of their nominees; they believe a president should have the right to choose whomever they please as America's legitimately elected leader; or they fear the president's political power. But this administration has no moral standing to which Senators should automatically defer. Bush gained the presidency through the extraordinary interventions of his brother Jeb and the existing Supreme Court. He was reelected based on lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida, John Kerry's war record, and the true costs of his tax cut and prescription drug plans. And through Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell's elimination of 300,000 overwhelmingly Democratic voters from the Ohio rolls and the withholding of voting machines from key Democratic precincts. My friend Egil Krogh, who worked in the Nixon administration, hired G. Gordon Liddy, and went to prison for Watergate, told the sentencing judge that he and his colleagues had "almost destroyed democracy." The Bush people, he said to me recently, "are even more ruthless."

Alito's nomination embodies that ruthlessness. If confirmed, his track record suggests he'd support the Republican consolidation of power at every opportunity. But maybe the capacity of that power to intimidate is finally beginning to wane. If the Senate can find the courage to block Alito's confirmation, they will draw a critical line on a choice whose effects could echo for the next forty years. They need to recognize the high stakes and extraordinary circumstances of our time.

The Nation: The Case Against Alito

With Judge Samuel Alito, the Senate Judiciary Committee faces its most consequential Supreme Court confirmation hearing in a generation. Not since Robert Bork has the Senate encountered a nominee whose long record and fully articulated views so consistently challenge decades of progress on privacy, civil rights and control of corporations. And never in memory has a single nomination so threatened to redirect the Court as Alito's, which would replace the pragmatically conservative swing-voter Sandra Day O'Connor.

Guest Commentary

• Experienced Alito ideal for Supreme Court (Rocky Mountain News) by John W. Suthers
• Alito's moment: Has Bush doomed his own nominee? (Los Angeles Times) by Edward Lazarus
• Our legal guardians (Los Angeles Times) by University of Chicago Law Prof Cass R. Sunstein

Columnists

• Alito's Challenge (Washington Post) by David S. Broder
• The Alito hearings (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review) by Bruce Fein
• What defines Judge Alito? (Denver Post) by John Aloysius Farrell

Alito Making Page One Today

• A Search for Order, an Answer in the Law (Washington Post) by Dale Russakoff and Jo Becker
• An Ideological Rumble: the Abortion Issue (San Francisco Chronicle) by Carolyne Zinko