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.