Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I left off my observations & commentary regarding Alito ten days ago and haven't gotten around to writing up my impressions of what I've heard and read since. Some of this has gotten stale in my brain, but let's see how much I can still make sense with.

When I last wrote about Alito, I said he didn't seem like the scariest person in the room at his hearing. That opinion still stands, but isn't exactly an endorsement. While there are bits of his past that cause raised eyebrows and questions, I don't think we're going to get any useful answers to those questions this year, and as almeda observed, some of the attempts to force satisfactory answers devolved into the "accusation masquerading as a question" zone, but that's not where I see the biggest problems anyhow. (Yeah, it's uncomfortable stuff if true; yeah, the evasiveness troubles me; it's not a smoking gun, and it's possible he was that sort of ass and then grew up. Too many unknowns.)

What tipped the balance for me was the testimony from the ... ah, ex-president? ... of NARAL, who made clear not only what the stakes are regarding certain kinds of restrictions on abortion, but also how a judge can make a ruling technically completely within the context of a law based on one party's rights while overlooking the rights/personhood/standing of the other party and their conflicting rights, with the result being a ruling that's hard to point to as "judicial activism" or "driven by ideology" but is still unfair, unjust, and harmful. She basically accused Alito not of being an ideologue, but of having a dangerous blind spot.

Her pointing out how adult women have been subjected to being treated, by the law, as though they were children ... was chillingly effective.

That, coupled with things Alito said about giving a certain amount of deferrence to the legislature and the executive, and what other people have written about patterns in his judicial record, was what made up my mind. I worry that Alito would be bad for our country, our Constitution, and our rights after all. I worry that laws infringing civil liberties would be okay by him as long as they were subtle enough that he could manage to overlook the individuals harmed by them. I worry that he'd not see certain classes of petitioners as being important enough, or "people enough", for their rights to matter. And I worry that he won't vigorously oppose maneuvers by the executive branch to upset the balance of powers that has been such an important part of the success of our nation's great experiment with democracy these past two-and-a-quarter centuries.

I'm not predicting the End Of The World ifwhen he gets confirmed, nor am I saying that he's the Worst Possible Choice ... only that as someone who cares about the Constitution and fairness and the continued political health of my homeland, I don't see his ascent to the Supreme Court as a good thing.

Others have pointed out that it's notoriously difficult to predict how Supreme Court judges will act on the bench, before they're there. Maybe Alito will surprise me. Maybe enough of the others will compensate for him. I don't know. But given what I know now, and what I have good reason to believe, I have to say it looks like most of us (by which I mean most of the citizens of, and visitors to, the United States) would have better odds of holding on to our rights if Alito were to be turned down. Again, it's not that I think he's part of some Evil Fascist Plot, or driven to flout the law by cleverly-hidden bigotry; just that I think he has a dangerous blind spot, and that's more than bad enough.

Basically, I get the impression that he sees corporations and the other branches of government more clearly, and hears their arguments more sharply, than he does "the little guy". The big players already have a lot of power; it's precisely "the little guy" who needs help having his rights protected. Not that the small player is always right, but the underdog must at least be heard.