Alito Confirmed to the Bench

Despite an attempt by Democrats in the Senate to oppose the confirmation of Samuel Alito as the 110th Justice on the Supreme Court, on Tuesday, January 31st, the Republican-led Congress gave President Bush yet another partisan victory as it voted 58-42 to confirm. This was the closest confirmation vote for a justice on the Court since the vote to confirm Clarence Thomas in 1991. In voting to confirm Judge Alito, only one of 55 Republicans in the Senate, Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, voted against the nomination, while four Democrats broke party ranks and voted in favor.

There was a last ditch effort by the Democrats in Congress the day before the confirmation vote to start a filibuster, but this was defeated by a vote of 72-25 to proceed to the final vote the next morning. As the votes to end the debate were counted, only 24 Democrats supported the filibuster, leaving them far short of the required 41 votes needed to sustain it and block the nomination.

Shortly after the 110th Justice to the Supreme Court was sworn in, he sat in the House Chamber with the other Justices as he watched President Bush give his fifth State of the Union speech. Alito even clapped at some of the President’s proposals. The next day, he surprised everyone when he broke ranks with the other conservatives on the bench. In a vote of 6–3, Justice Alito sided with the 5 liberal/moderate justices to refuse the second attempt of Missouri to execute Michael Taylor, who was sentenced to death in 1989 for the kidnapping, rape, and stabbing death of a 15 year-old girl in Kansas City.

This was just the first of many important cases coming before the newly restructured Supreme Court for the remainder of its term. Pending requests include a fight for a law to make “partial-birth” abortions illegal (a law already struck down by several federal courts as unconstitutional), a case examining the President’s power to hold U.S. citizens as “enemy combatants” in a wartime setting, and oral arguments in several cases including Congressional redistricting in Texas, rights of terrorists held oversees facing U.S. military tribunals, development near environmentally sensitive wetlands, and the use of lethal-injection as a humane method for execution of death-row inmates.

While this confirmation has certainly changed the balance of the Court, it has not, as some have predicted, doomed us to a period of a conservative court bent on eliminating fundamental rights. While this may still happen if another vacancy pops up before the end of Bush’s final term in office, we still have a properly split set of justices. As of now, the most significant change is the new member’s ability to help bring more issues the conservative justices would like to hear onto the agenda. While this could lead to decisions we should all fear - the overturning of Roe v. Wade, or the destruction of campaign finance laws - it is not, at this point, guaranteed to happen. It is just much more likely that it is a possibility in the near future.