Fritz Feds

Posted 10:08 AM by magnu231
Politics and the Court

I think it's interesting that most of the opposition to Alito has fallen into one of two categories. First is the political attack disguised as an attack on credentials or some other feature of Alito the man. However, this attack has been given pretty short shrift by everyone. Democrats are left with the "liberals should vote against Alito because he's a far-right, activist judge, who doesn't unite the country", which of course, translated into out of poli-speech means, "he's against abortion, and we don't like that." Such a blatant political argument is quite a political boon for the Republican party, however. Democrats feel the need to rally their base, which, apart from the absurdly disconnected-from-reality-left, is not really rallying, feeling perhaps the battle is, in this case, to the strong, and feeling no particular need to rally. The real problem the Democrats have, of course, is that most observers realize the enormous hypocrisy of their position (a position they are not infrequently in, as some new book that my Dad is currently reading points out). They were all for Justices Ginsburg and Breyer, both of whom had similar if not inferior credentials to Alito. And no one could accuse Ginsburg or Breyer of moving the country to the middle, unless you're as far left as some are, and think the middle is allowing Christians to remain in the country. They don't seem to realize that not only would overturning Roe not make abortions illegal, but that half of the country would like to see abortions made illegal, that there is another side to the issue, and that the president, as Clinton did, has a right to appoint a Justice as he sees fit. Of course the President will feel political pressures when appointing someone, as he should, and as he did with Miers, an incident I think is a great representation that political power can sometimes be leveraged by those with only a computer in front of them and not a whole lot of money behind them. But I've gone a bit afield. I simply mean to say that the Democrats have very little to go on, which is why at this moment somewhere, someone liberal is doubtless rummaging through every corner of Alito's work, life, family background, etc looking for some reason to keep someone who may have a different view from sitting on the bench.

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