It's Alito

President Bush has nominated Judge Samuel Alito, an unambiguous conservative from the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, for the Supreme Court:

Legal experts consider the 55-year-old Alito so ideologically similar to Justice Antonin Scalia that he has earned the nickname "Scalito."

In 1991, in one of his more well-known decisions, he was the only dissenting voice in a 3rd Circuit ruling striking down a Pennsylvania law that required women to notify their husbands if they planned to get an abortion.

He also wrote the opinion in 1999 in a case that said a Christmas display on city property did not violate separation of church and state doctrines because it included a large plastic Santa Claus as well as religious symbols.

Alito was put on the circuit court bench by President George H.W. Bush in 1990 after his service as U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey.

He also served as assistant to Solicitor General Rex E. Lee from 1981 to 1985 and deputy assistant to Attorney General Edwin Meese from 1985 to 1987.

A Trenton, New Jersey, native, Alito graduated from Princeton in 1972 and earned his law degree from Yale in 1975.
[...]
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid -- a Nevada Democrat who had recommended Miers -- said Sunday he feared Bush would "try to placate the right wing" with his next nominee, "and that's a mistake."

"If he wants to divert attention ... he can send us someone who's going to cause a lot of problems," Reid told CNN, saying the "radical right wing" was "pushing all his buttons, and he may just go along."

Reid said the choice of Alito "would create a lot of problems."

"That is not one of the names that I've suggested to the president," he said. "In fact, I've done the opposite."

I must have overlooked the constitutional provision that gives the Senate Minority Leader the right to pick the nominee. As for Alito, he certainly sounds qualified, but I'd like to learn some more about his past decisions before I decide whether I'd support him. (My goodness, the Americans are actually going to have another debate over whether a nominee to the highest court in the land deserves to be there. Don't they know the enlightened, Canadian way is to leave the decision entirely up to the whims of the Prime Minister?)

Update: the Washington Post has more background:

While he has been dubbed "Scalito" by some lawyers for a supposed affinity to conservative Justice Antonin Scalia and his Italian-American heritage, most observers believe that greatly oversimplifies his record.

Alito is considered far less provocative a figure than Scalia both in personality and judicial temperament. His opinions and dissents tend to be dryly analytical rather than slashing.

In addition, his appeals court record is not uniformly conservative on the sorts of issues that arise in Supreme Court confirmation battles.

In 2004, he ruled in favor of a complaint brought under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act by a boy badly bullied by his classmates who was seeking legal relief but had been rebuffed by a U.S. District Court.

He also authored a majority opinion granting federal court review to an African American who could not get state courts to hear his claim of racial bias on the part of a juror in his trial. The case involved a juror who used racial epithets outside the confines of the jury room.

His record on the appeals court makes Alito less liable to suggestions made about Roberts, with only two years as a judge, that he is somehow a judicial mystery.

Rather, liberals are likely to focus on his opinions and dissents, most notably in the 1991 case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
[...]
In the area of church and state, Alito has been consistently supportive of the conservative view that the courts should be more accommodating when considering state entanglement with religion. He wrote a majority opinion in ACLU v. Schundler , holding that a city's holiday display that included a creche and menorah did not violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment because it included secular symbols as well, such as Frosty the Snowman.

My default position on appointments to the Supreme Court - on either side of the border - is that if the nominee is experienced and intelligent enough, opponents of the nomination bear the burden of showing me why he or she shouldn't be nominated to the court. (Here in Canada, I wish opponents would at least get that chance.) Certainly, the Post story makes Alito sound much less doctinaire than his detractors (and the CNN story linked above) say, and considering how long the man has been a judge, I'd have to say I'm in favor, at least for now.

Posted by damian at October 31, 2005 09:37 AM | TrackBack