Alito Nomination

After a disastrous response from the Republicans in Congress and his political base, President Bush withdrew Harriet Miers, a relatively qualified Supreme Court nominee, from consideration by the Senate at her request. Upon hearing of the withdrawal of the nomination, the president of the Conservative American Values Organization said there was great relief among Bush’s conservative allies, and that they hoped for someone with a defined conservative philosophy. That is what Bush gave them. A few days later he nominated Judge Samuel Alito, who could well have been his first choice when trying to replace Justice O’Connor after successfully nominating John Roberts as the Chief Justice.
You may be asking yourself why President Bush would not nominate the most qualified candidate first. Some people believe that he nominated Harriet Miers in an effort to replace Justice O’Connor with another female Justice, fulfilling the wishes of O’Connor as well as women within both the administration and the country. After all, why else would the President nominate a qualified but less experienced candidate whose views did not match those of his political base over the candidate who, according to Bush, is the appointee with the “most prior judicial experience than any Supreme Court nominee in more then 70 years”?
Although these thoughts are pure speculation by analysts, they have yet to be refuted by any statement from the Bush Administration. When asked about other female candidates in a press briefing following the announcement of Judge Alito’s nomination, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan vaguely alluded to the voluntary removal of the names of other female nominees after they saw the fight over Miers. This cannot be confirmed, however, since the Administration has been ambiguous at best when asked to reveal the names or the number of other female candidates who were considered for the nomination. This might be the administration’s attempt to say: we tried a woman, but since her experience was questioned by our own party, we went to the next person on the list - who happens to be extremely conservative, but also extremely experienced, and whose qualifications cannot be called into question.
Regardless of what President Bush’s true intentions may have been when nominated Judge Alito, it was his first shaky step back onto solid ground after his presidency was thrown into disarray from a barrage of troubles. Those problems include the current fight over the accuracy of the intelligence used to take the country into the Iraq War, the indictment of the Vice President’s Chief of Staff over the leak of the identity of a CIA operative (and the ongoing investigation into events surrounding the leak), and the administration’s disastrous response to Katrina.

Judge Samuel Alito is an Ivy League alumnus with fifteen years of judicial experience on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, three years experience as the U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, three years experience as the deputy assistant to the U.S. Attorney General, and four years experience as assistant to the U.S. Solicitor General. He is obviously a well-educated man with impressive credentials. However, the decisions he has made over the last twenty-five years of his career have raised some questions. These decisions, which may cause apprehension among the Democrats in the Senate and on the Senate Judicial Committee, include support of a provision requiring notification of a spouse before a woman seeks an abortion, the striking down of a law prohibiting student newspapers from running ads for alcohol, and a ruling that Congress does not have the authority to regulate private gun possession.
Upon hearing the announcement made by President Bush concerning the next Supreme Court nominee, Congress felt that the President was pandering too much to his ideological base. Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) said, “Instead of uniting this country through his choice, the president has chosen to reward one faction of his party, at the risk of dividing the country … the initial review of Judge Alito’s record shows that there’s a real chance that he will, like Scalia, choose to make law instead of interpret law and move the court in a direction quite different than it has gone”. The minority leader in the Senate, Harry Reid (D-NV), has voiced his opinion of the nominee as well, stating that “this appointment ignores the value of diverse backgrounds and perspectives”.
Despite these concerns, there have been statements made by key Democrats and the Gang of 14 (a group of seven moderate Republicans and seven moderate Democrats formed earlier this year to end the fight over federal judgeship nominations) that indicate Judge Alito’s nomination will probably be voted on in early February, after a lengthy appearance before the Senate Judicial Committee beginning January 9th. This date is later than President Bush would have liked, as he is anxious to replace the moderate voice of Justice O’Connor with the much more conservative voice of Judge Alito. He wants to do this to fulfill the wishes of his base and the conservatives in the country, not to fulfill Justice O’Connor’s wishes. If President Bush gets what he wants - and he probably will, as a filibuster seems unlikely and the candidate is too qualified to be denied - the balance of the Court will be significantly changed. It will shift from generally moderate to solidly conservative.
You may ask yourself why this is important. The cases the court hears and how they decide those cases will change significantly if the balance of the court is altered. If Alito is confirmed to the bench, the customary rule for which cases are heard, known as the Rule of Four (if four justices express their desire to hear a case, it will be put onto the docket and presented to the court) will mean that conservatives will have disproportionate sway. If Justice Alito is nominated there will be a conservative Rule of Four. These four conservative justices will then have the power to choose which cases are heard and which are not. This new shift in the balance will make it possible for a conservative majority to change past decisions that they feel were decided poorly, and be able to decide the future cases in accordance with their own interpretation of how the law should be.
When you really get down to it, both sides interpret the Constitution as they feel it should be interpreted. The so-called liberals and activists are doing what the Framers of the Constitution hoped, which is to adapt the Constitution to the world that the United States exists in today, instead of holding it to the ideals of the eighteenth century. The justices on the Court should not be divided between an activist and a constructionist viewpoint, but should instead follow the ideal of Jurisprudence of Original Intent, whereby they attempt to position themselves above any form of bias, including ideological and religious. While those ideals are important, and I am not criticizing them, they should not be used by the Supreme Court to make decisions. We should instead interpret the Constitution by the spirit of the framers, and not strictly by the words they used to create it.