Who is this Alito?

On July 1, 2005, the much-beloved Supreme Justice Sandra Day O’Connor sent her notice of retirement to President Bush. Initially, Bush nominated John Roberts to fill her seat, but chose to give him a bid for Chief Justice upon Renquist’s death on September 3. He then nominated long-time friend and counsel Harriet Myers amid vast accusations of croneyism. The nomination fell through, and on November 10, 2005, Bush nominated Justice Samuel Alito to fill O’Connor’s seat. The Senate Judiciary Committee voted for his confirmation 10-8, along party lines. The Senate shortly followed suit, despite Sens. John Kerry and Ted Kennedy’s call for a filibuster, though notably, four Democratic senators from traditionally conservative states did vote in favor of the nomination, and Lincoln Chaffee, the honorable senator from Rhode Island became the one Republican to vote against the nomination. Yet the question still remains, what will all of this mean to the American people in their everyday lives?
On the surface, Judge Samuel A. Alito, Jr. appears to be another harmless Supreme Court Justice whose rulings will probably be ignored as a piece of precedence that has no effect on the vast majority of Americans. On the other hand, he has the power to decide a case as influential as Roe v. Wade, a disturbing proposition considering his jurisprudence. This is not to demean his legal capabilities. He comes to office with a list of impressive credentials. Not only did he graduate from Princeton University and Yale School of Law, where he was the editor of the Yale Law Journal, but he has spent thousands of hours in high powered legal positions. Early in his career, he was assistant to both the Attorney General and the Solicitor general, and he also provided constitutional advice to the executive branch between 1985 and 1987 (back when the executive branch cared about the constitution). His credentials are further verified by his anonymous confirmation to both the office of US Attorney for New Jersey and the position of justice on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. These items are not an issue here. The issue is the direction Alito wishes to take this country.
Alito’s views waffle between the left and the right with no apparent thoughts to moderation. Evidence of such inconsistency is ample from the beginning of his public life. At Princeton, Alito wrote an assignment based on “the boundaries of privacy in American society.” This report advocated tolerance for homosexuality and accused the CIA and FBI of intervening too strongly in civilian lives. Even so, it must be brought into consideration that the assignment was to recommend ways to protect individual rights, necessitating a response that would concede the need for these rights to be protected in the first place. On the flipside, Alito is also listed in the membership of the university’s Concerned Alumni Society, which sought to bar the practice of sex-blind admissions, and opposed the university’s affirmative action program. Granted, Alito denies any involvement in the organization, despite thinking it important enough to list on a job application to the Reagan administration 13 years after his graduation in 1985. Perhaps listing an organization on a resume and never having been involved are actually the same thing, and the rest of the world just has yet to accept that degree of resumé-padding.
Alito’s court decisions further enforce the notion that he has no coherent and workable world view. His track record includes evidence that he is pro-free-speech, anti-gun-control, anti-choice, and against the separation of church and state, as well as being in favor of a strong executive power.
Hitting close to home is his majority opinion in the 2004 case The Pitt News v. Pappert. In the ruling, it was decided that Pennsylvania’s attempts to control advertisements for alcohol in publications affiliated with educational institutions, was an unconstitutional attempt to control media coming out of the educational sector. This puts one mark in favor of the newly appointed judge, but it takes more than a single court decision to offset his less than shining record for civil rights. All this is not to mention that his alleged defense of the First Amendment comes with the qualification that “Government can attempt to cow the media in general by singling it out for special financial burdens. Government can also seek to control, weaken, or destroy a disfavored segment of the media by targeting that segment.” (The Pitt News v. Pappert 03-1725, 13, [2004]). So while the court decision does support the principles on which this country was founded, the wording of Alito’s opinion shows an apparent disregard for such standards.
Granted, this is one case, and one opinion, but how then does one explain his other precedents? Judge Samuel Alito has a history of ignoring set precedent, a dangerous practice in a country where the common law system is based on established precedent and public opinion. Most notably, are two cases involving immigration, in which Alito dissented and was harshly criticized for his opinions. In the first, Tipu v. I.N.S., where Alito ignored an African man’s plea that he would be persecuted on his return home, his fellow justices argued that his dissent would “gut the statutory standard…[and] ignore precedent” (Boston Globe 11/2/2005). The second, Chang v. I.N.S. involved a Vietnamese man facing sanctions if he were to return home, and Alito’s dissenting opinion to carry on with the deportation violated previously codified precedents, yet continued his trend of siding with the government. In two-thirds of his previous cases involving the government or government agencies, Alito has sided with the government, a dangerous practice in a time where the government seems committed to curtailing its citizens’ civil liberties. This is particularly troubling when combined with Alito’s support of the unitary executive theory, as asserted in a 2000 speech to the Federalist Society, in which he stated “We were strong proponents of the theory of the unitary executive, that all federal executive power is vested by the Constitution in the president.”
This is the theory the Bush administration has been using to consistently hack away at American civil liberties. It is also the same theory that Hitler referred to as Fuehrerprinzip, and used to turn his legal elected Chancellorship of Germany into a highly dangerous dictatorship. Support of this concept is perilous in any executive, but when it is being embraced by the very institution that is obliged to stand guard against such abuses of Constitutional privilege, it signals impending doom for the flagship of liberty in the world. And as though it is not enough to be in defense of the number one enemy to civil liberty, Alito himself seeks to curtail the right to privacy.
In the highly criticized dissent of Doe v. Groody, Alito argued that policemen did indeed have the right to perform a strip search on Mary Doe, the ten year old child of the subject of the warrant. Not only was this a ridiculous and unprecedented invasion of privacy and violation of a child, but it argued for a system in which search warrants have no meaning. Mary Doe was not the subject of the warrant, and therefore, the officers had no right to violate her person. If policemen are given such far-reaching powers, the United States is in danger of heading towards a military state. Yet this is only the beginning of Alito’s persistence on curtailing human rights. He also sought to greatly limit Roe v. Wade in his 1991 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. In this case, he sought to limit a woman’s right to choose by deciding that a woman must notify her husband before having an abortion. This legislation would have severely restricted the provisions of Roe v. Wade, thus threatening the rights that generations of women have fought for. And this is not the only case of Alito’s disregard for a woman’s rights.
In Sheridan v. E.I. Dupont de Nemours, Alito was the sole dissenter in a case involving discrimination on gender. Barbera Sheridan was a hotel employee who had been with her employer for 10 years and received numerous promotions as well as generous pay raises, yet was fired after filing a sexual harassment claim. Alito’s dissent against Sheridan set forth the idea of a system which would allow employers to avoid stating a reason for termination. This would effectively grant employers the freedom to fire anyone they chose for whatever reasons they desired, reversing the right against unlawful termination, and endangering the structures on which we depend for a stable working environment. In addition to taking an unpopular and retroactive approach to the issue of bringing suit based on sexual harassment, Alito has also attempted to reverse the wheels of the civil rights movement.
In three separate cases, Alito adopted troubling opinions in cases based on race. In one notable case Bray v. Marriot Hotels, very similar to the one above, an African-American hotel employee found cause to believe she had been denied a promotion based on her race. The Court of Appeals ruled in her favor, but in Alito’s dissent, he proposed a system that would greatly limit the ability of employees to sue on the basis of racial discrimination. In the words of his colleagues, “[Alito’s] position would immunize an employer from the reach of Title VII [a section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964] if the employer’s belief that it had selected the ‘best’ candidate, was the result of conscious racial bias” (Bray, 110 F.3d at 993). Take this in conjunction with the opinions he issued Grant v. Shalala, and Riley v. Taylor. The first raises barriers to cases based on racial discrimination, much as his opinion in Bray. The second involves the case of an African-American defendant who was tried by an all-white jury after the three African-American members of the panel were allegedly removed because of their race. The rest of the panel found in favor of the defendant, in keeping with the Supreme Court decision in Miller v. Dretke, which found that mass rejection of qualified candidates of color is more than chance, and cannot be allowed in a fair and balanced judiciary.
Clearly, this judicial candidate has a history of undermining the principles on which this country was founded. How can he adopt these opinions and still believe in equality of opportunity? Is Alito’s America one that we would want for ourselves and future generations? I doubt it. Though, in Alito’s defense, he has made one strong defense of “civil liberties.” In U.S. v. Rybar, Alito argued that a 60 year old ban on fully automatic machine guns was unconstitutional. Perhaps he hopes to use his Uzi to establish a full-blown military state.