Nuts & Boalts: Alito Bit of Cuba

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Alito Bit of Cuba

Feel free to mouth off on the impending comfirmation of Judge Alito as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Labels: Rabid Conservatives

19 Comments:

Anonymous said...: I would like to know from some of our classmates who did their undergrad at Princeton what they know/think/have heard of Concerned Alumni of Princeton.; 1/11/2006 6:05 PM
Anonymous said...: Speaking of which, how can he not remember joining an organization that wanted to discriminate?; 1/11/2006 8:02 PM
Anonymous said...: My guess is that CAP really wasn't a big deal to him one way or the other, and that he put it down only because he was looking for conservative credentials. He knew it was shorthand for being "conservative" on issues of race and gender. He was telling the administration that he wasn't one of these feminist, integrationist wackos. That the alternative was to associate himself with bigots didn't bother him so long as he got the job. I think that's pretty disturbing, but not quite as disturbing as if he actively supported CAP's agenda. It makes him a typical opportunistic, slightly immoral conservative, but not a virulent bigot.; 1/11/2006 10:48 PM
Anonymous said...: From the confirmation hearings I've heard broadcast on the radio, he sounds like a reasonable person. In fact, these hearings serve more to remind me what self-aggrandizing windbags fill up the Senate, and how poorly they understand Supreme Court jurisprudence.

E.g. Chuck Schumer (D-NY): goes on at length about Alito's 1985, one-sentence indication that he thinks Roe is unconstitutional, implying that Alito would deny an abortion in all cases to a woman who had been raped by her father. WTF?!! Shoots down Alito for trying to explain his mindset at the time. A tremendous exercise in ignoring the context. I agree with the earlier poster: it's evidence of lack of character, but not dogmatism per se.

In other words, I see politics as usual.; 1/12/2006 12:45 AM
Armen Adzhemyan said...: I just watched the Schumer exchange on replay also, probably around the same time as the previous commenter, and I have to disagree with that characterization. I grant that Schumer looked like an idiot with his questioning, but that's style over substance. Alito's statement that the constitution does not protect the right to an abortion MUST necessarily not have any exceptions. You can't have a non-existent right with exceptions. That's a very fair point to make, and in fact to grill a supreme court nominee on. I'm just not sure that Chuck Schumer did that.; 1/12/2006 1:31 AM
Tom Fletcher said...: Confirm him already. I'd have preferred McConnell if I had to have a conservative judge, but that's the way it goes. The hearings are ridiculous; let's get on to one with teeth and watch some Abramhoff-fingered trials.; 1/12/2006 11:37 AM
Anonymous said...: I graduated from Princeton in '03 and even though I'm pretty on top of alumni news and follow things closely, I had never heard of CAP until the Alito connection surfaced. It definitely is not prominent on campus and most students had no clue what it was. Seems like the kind of thing that just a few far-right students knew about or cared about.; 1/12/2006 1:50 PM
wt said...: One of the best hypotheses I've heard regarding CAP came from a Volokh Conspiracy commenter. That Alito, in 1985, was exploiting CAP for his application narrative.

Sure, I'm an Italian with a traditional name, the son of immigrants, and was never in any of the exclusive clubs at Princeton. But that doesn't mean I hold a grudge against the establishement. See I was in this org where we protected the ROTC, whined about affirmative action, and tried to get more legacy admittances. I'm one of you.

If this is true, I think it's perfectly reasonable that he would forget about it. Who always remembers specifically how they exploited the political tendencies of others two decades ago?; 1/12/2006 4:24 PM
Anonymous said...: I guess the next time someone suggests that Berkeley is a liberal or radical place, I can just refer them to this thread. I heard someone say yesterday that if Alito is confirmed, then Scalia will only be the #4 most conservative justice! But Boalt students say, "confirm him already!"; 1/12/2006 6:20 PM
Anonymous said...: 6:20 - I'm a liberal and I say confirm him already. What can we expect? For Bush to nominate someone liberal? All things considered, Alito isn't that bad, and some of the Democrat senators are making horses asses of themselves by taking his decisions out of context and telling half-truths. I wish there was someone in Washington we could believe. These days the only ones I marginally believe are the conservative Democrats (minus Zell) and "moderate" Republicans (like Snowe or DeWine). The ends of the spectrum are completely unbelievable, Democrat or Republican.; 1/12/2006 10:31 PM
Anonymous said...: 10:31 -
Republicans have shown they can nominate moderates to the Court, like O'Connor, who has been a key vote in protecting reproductive freedom and containing executive power. Anyone who thinks Alito won't vote to overturn and severely limit Roe v. Wade is delusional. And did you catch his stuff on the "Unitary Executive?" It sounds like John Yoo and certainly not what a Justice on the highest court in a democracy should be on board with. One more justice like Alito and many of our careers will be very, very different.; 1/13/2006 9:13 AM
Armen Adzhemyan said...: 9:13, see Miers. Thank you.; 1/13/2006 9:22 AM
Anonymous said...: I think we should get a person who both (1) has judicial experience, unlike Miers, and (2) is not an extremist.; 1/13/2006 2:31 PM
Tom Fletcher said...: 2:31,

How do you propose we get a better judicial nominee when we a) lost the election to nominate the justice, and b) have fewer than fifty one votes in the Senate?

The American people had the choice last November and made it. That's the way it goes. The filibuster may serve some purposes, but it is an inherently anti-majority instrument (see Strom Thurmond). And honestly, with lobbyist corruption, wiretapping, and the business of running America, I think the Senate has better things to do right now than hem and haw until a slightly different nominee gets put out there.

I just don't see how the math and political manuevering works out, but I'd love to know if I was wrong.; 1/14/2006 1:16 PM
Anonymous said...: Yeah. Won the election. People have spoken. Chose Bush? Somehow, not quite how I remember it. Alito not that bad? Have we really slipped so far?; 1/15/2006 12:32 AM
Tom Fletcher said...: Sunstein posted intelligently here:

http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/faculty/2006/01/confirming_just.html; 1/15/2006 9:21 AM
Anonymous said...: Did anyone notice the scary addition to team Scalia-Thomas in the dissent from the Oregon assisted suicide law decision today? Are we on the way to scary team Scalia-Thomas-Roberts-Alito? The pre-election Supreme Court doom and gloom predictions are coming true. Too bad its going to take the judicial equivalent of bombing us back to the stone age to wake America up to the Republicans' deceitful practices that result in middle-America voting against its own self interest. Bye bye, modern freedom. See ya in 100 years.; 1/17/2006 11:47 PM
Anonymous said...: They won't do a judicial "bombing us back to do the stone age." Instead, they will launch very unspectacular but very effective attacks that will strip away all of our rights. For example, Roe won't be overturned (that would get their team voted out of office)but it will be narrowed into oblivion. It's sort of like how the CIA first tries to bribe all the leaders in a Third World country because that's much cleaner than having to kill them.; 1/18/2006 12:10 AM
Anonymous said...: So what you're saying is, that they will judicially bomb us back into the stone age.; 1/19/2006 9:12 PM

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Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Alito Bit of Cuba

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