The Curious Anti-Alito Dance

When last we visited this fascinating phenomenon, the Left was abandoning the attack avenues of abortion and affirmative action in favor of going after Supreme Court Justice-designate Samuel Alito on his supposedly bitter opposition to voting rights for black Americans.

Apparently that gambit didn't take, either:

Senator Arlen Specter is a Pennsylvania Republican who favors keeping abortion legal. Senator Sam Brownback is a Kansas Republican who wants to outlaw it. But both senators came away from meetings with Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito reassured about his views on the controversial issue.

Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he was impressed by Alito's respect for the right to privacy and the value of legal precedent, both factors that weigh against overturning the right to abortion. Brownback came away feeling that Alito “is open to review of cases,” something that raises the hopes of those who want the Supreme Court to void its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion legal nationwide.

As Alito makes the rounds on Capitol Hill — meeting with senators who will vote on confirming him as the replacement for retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a swing vote on abortion and other controversies — he has achieved an unusual political feat.

The veteran federal appeals court judge has managed so far to impress conservatives without losing the support of moderates who disagree with them on such issues as abortion, affirmative action, the environment and the role of religion in public life — all of which are likely to come before the Supreme Court. Georgetown University law professor Paul Rothstein said “everybody has a hope that he will do the right thing,” even though they don't agree on what that is.

Alito's ability to maintain the support of Senate centrists will be key to winning his confirmation vote, now scheduled for January.

Judge Alito getting over on the Hill shouldn't be as eyebrow-raising as this USA Today piece tries to depict. As he will say in his hearings six weeks from now, and just as Chief Justice John Roberts said two months back, Alito's personal views on issues are not germaine to his judicial philosophy and how he would rule on Olympus. The notion of judicial restraint, of leaving the policymaking to elected officials and simply applying the existing law and original constitutional text, is apparently beyond the capabilities of official Washington to conceive.

And so the dance continues with two fresh salvos. First, a Reagan-era Alito memo that his foes are claiming indicates he hates "furiners" [h/t Cap'n Ed]:

As a senior lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department, Samuel A. Alito Jr. argued that immigrants who enter the United States illegally and foreigners living outside their countries are not entitled to the constitutional rights afforded to Americans.

In an opinion that offers insight into the Supreme Court nominee's view of an area of law that has gained new significance with the Bush Administration's policies to combat terrorism, Alito gave his approval to an FBI effort in the 1980s to collect from Canadian authorities fingerprint cards of Iranian and Afghan refugees living in that country.

The program to collect background information was constitutional, Alito wrote in a January 1986 memo to the FBI director. And because the refugees were nonresident immigrants of a third country, he reasoned, the FBI could disregard court decisions that prohibited it from spreading "stigmatizing" information about citizens.

In other words, Alito wanted DOJ to be able to "connect the dots," an ability that the later Gorelick "wall" made impossible, which in turn paved the way for the 9/11 attacks. Gaia knows what a Justice Alito would do to protect the President's constitutional war-fighting powers; how will we ever give al Qaeda another crack at us if THIS organ grinder is allowed onto the SCOTUS?

Not to be outdone by the WaPo, the Boston Globe takes its shot along similar lines [h/t El Rushbo]:

As a young Reagan Administration lawyer, the Supreme Court nominee, Samuel A. Alito Jr., took an expansive view of government law-enforcement powers in numerous cases in which he was called upon to balance the prerogatives of police and prosecutors with the rights of individuals, according to 400 pages of documents released yesterday by the Justice Department.

The documents show that Alito once advised against including a ban on capital punishment for minors, in an agreement by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Such matters should be left for individual states to decide, he said.

So Judge Alito (1) didn't believe the United States should subordinate its laws and Constitution to U.N. dictates, and (2) believed in upholding precedent on the juvenile death penalty, which the SCOTUS had done, if memory serves, just the year before. And which the SCOTUS itself overturned last year, citing....international law.

Limbaugh (of all people) fretted today about this "drip, drip, drip" of leftish attacks on the Supreme Court nominee and the unnecessary additional month that Chairman "Snarlin' Arlen" has provided for them. But it looks to me like the lib fever swamps will have to do a lot better than this if they expect to have a credible chance of throttling Judge Alito's nomination with GOP indulgence.