Out of My Mind

On just about every point including, in a sense, not believing in a Supreme Court, more specifically, in a system of checks and balances.

Here's a start:

The Case Against Alito

[from the January 23, 2006 issue]

With Judge Samuel Alito, the Senate Judiciary Committee faces its most consequential Supreme Court confirmation hearing in a generation. Not since Robert Bork has the Senate encountered a nominee whose long record and fully articulated views so consistently challenge decades of progress on privacy, civil rights and control of corporations. And never in memory has a single nomination so threatened to redirect the Court as Alito's, which would replace the pragmatically conservative swing-voter Sandra Day O'Connor. Alito's opening statement before the Judiciary Committee is January 9, but his true testimony consists of fifteen years of rulings on issues from abortion to school prayer to immigration. That record demonstrates that Alito is at odds with the interests of ordinary Americans.

Supreme Court nominees get, and usually deserve, much benefit of the doubt. But with Alito, the doubt is all of the nominee's making, and has only grown with revelations of his Reagan-era memos. As an ambitious Reagan Administration lawyer, he boasted in a now-famous 1985 job application of his conviction that Roe v. Wade should be overturned; opposed the historic one-person, one-vote decision of the Warren Court; and waved like a badge of honor his membership in a far-right Princeton alumni network notorious for its hostility to admitting women and African-Americans. Alito's defense of Nixon-era officials implicated in illegal wiretaps makes clear--in light of today's NSA wiretap scandal--that the Bush Administration's motives in Alito's nomination extend well beyond a token nod to social conservatives.

Nothing in Alito's hundreds of federal appeals court rulings in the years since suggests any mellowing of those fundamental commitments. After a careful study, University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein described Alito's record of appeals court dissents as "stunning. Ninety-one percent of Alito's dissents take positions more conservative than his colleagues...including colleagues appointed by Presidents Bush and Reagan." A new study by the Alliance for Justice makes the case even more emphatically: In so-called split decisions--the most difficult cases, which divided the appeals court--"Alito has frequently gone to the right of even his Republican-appointed colleagues to find against individuals claiming that government officials or corporations violated the law." He has argued strenuously in favor of the strip search of a 10-year-old girl not accused of criminal wrongdoing; supported warrantless surveillance of a criminal suspect when other courts had disallowed the practice; and tried to strip his fellow judges of the power to grant habeas corpus rights to undocumented immigrants, a position pointedly repudiated by the Supreme Court.

This is big-government jurisprudence with a vengeance. The only exception to Alito's big-government activism comes with the regulation of business. There he seems to be on a one-man crusade to undo decades of regulation, most clearly displayed in a still-astounding dissent arguing that the federal ban on machine guns violates the Constitution's commerce clause--a radical position (exceeding even Chief Justice John Roberts's famously constricted view of the Endangered Species Act) that would shred not only gun-control statutes but a host of environmental laws and other Congressional action.

Democrats as well as moderate Republicans have so far played their cards close. Will the handful of Democratic progressives who voted for the confirmation of Roberts--including Russell Feingold and Patrick Leahy--see themselves as free to oppose a nominee without Roberts's discretion about his own commitments? Will the party discipline so often exercised by minority leader Harry Reid extend to what is certain to be an emotional confirmation fight? Will civil-libertarian Republicans like Arlen Specter recognize in Alito not just a threat to Roe v. Wade but to the fundamental balance of executive and legislative power? And what about the "Gang of 14," the Republican and Democratic senators like Joe Lieberman and John McCain who last year agreed to avoid judicial filibusters except in rare circumstances? They should recall that a key principle uniting them then was that the White House should consult the Senate on judicial appointments; on Alito, the White House consulted no one but the extreme right.

The White House is banking on fear that if this second nominee goes down, Bush will nominate someone even worse. This argument ignores history: When in 1969-70 President Nixon nominated and lost both Clement Haynsworth and Harrold Carswell, the result was not "someone worse" but the pragmatic, humane Judge Harry Blackmun, who later wrote Roe v. Wade; when Bork was Borked, his replacement was Anthony Kennedy, who in 1992 joined fellow Reagan nominee O'Connor to reaffirm Roe. Alito defeatism also ignores today's political climate: As the midterm elections draw closer, as the Iraq War scandals deepen, Senate Republicans are falling over one another to distance themselves from the Administration and the far right.

Alito will undoubtedly try to backpedal from his unambiguous track record. That only makes more urgent the case against the real Alito revealed in his memos and rulings. The American people are not ready for a nominee so profoundly committed to intrusive government, whether that means right-to-lifers intruding on sexual privacy, religious fanatics intruding in the science classroom or the NSA intruding on phone calls without a warrant. Far from being a mainstream conservative, Judge Alito represents a malignant future; his entire biography suggests he will swing the Supreme Court toward a right-wing authoritarianism that's out of step with the public and the Constitution.

And then there's this (too much work to link to):

A History of Alito's Decisions
By Denis Mueller

During the next few month's we will repeatedly be told what
a good family man Judge Alito is. However, the question I
would like to ask you, after you learn about some of his
decisions, is whether he is decent man at all? In 1986,
Altio helped write an opinion which stated that employers
could legally fire AIDS victims because of a "fear of
contagion, whether reasonable or not." What does this mean?
It means that during this time of hysteria the judge felt
that if you can fire people, even though your fears were
irrational, and turned out to be incorrect. Years later, he
defended this position by defending, "our belief in the
rightness of our decision."

To further, illustrate that he is a homophobic bully, Alito
even championed bullies with his decision to overrule a
school board, which prohibited harassment against gay
students. He said, showing a shocking departure from strict
reading of the constitution, that it was a violation of
first amendment rights to forbid simple acts of teasing.
The First Amendment guarantees the right of political
speech and says nothing about teasing or bullying people.

If you think that he cares about the American family, well
think again. Alito ruled against the popular family leave
act saying that it did not apply to the millions of state
employees across the country. The Supreme Court, with
William Rehnquist writing for the majority, overturned it.
If you ever wondered, what the new federalism means well it
is simply this. We will roll over your families in favor of
our right wing ideology.

In 1997, Alito cast the deciding vote in case that blocked
citizens from the right to sue polluters. However, that
was not enough for Alito who also dismissed a $2.6 million
dollar fine against Magnesium Elektron for violating the
act. The Supreme Court in an 8-2 decision overturned the
decision. In another decision, he struck down an opinion
that had forced the W.R. Grace Company to pay for the
pollution it had caused. The company had polluted the
drinking water of the residents of Lansing, Michigan. Nice
man this Alito is.

Here is some other of his decisions. He ruled that a black
housekeeping woman who was passed over for promotion by the
Marriot hotel chain could not sue. He also supported the
rights of gun owners to own machine guns. This, for those
of you that are in law enforcement, is a slap in the face.
One of his most egregious decisions was in a 1991 Appeals
Court decision where he upheld a Michigan law that required
a woman to tell her husband about an abortion.

The case concerned a woman who was terrified by her abusive
partner who she felt would beat her up. Sandra Day O'Conner
rejected Alito's arguments. "The state may not give to a
man the kind of domination over his wife that parents
exercise over their children." Therefore, as you can see,
the man is constantly overturned in higher courts. This is
the kind of judge we do not need on the Supreme Court, and
while some of you may say I am anti-Bush and I am, I would
have voted yes to Judge Roberts even though my ideology is
quite different than his. Alito is neither a good judge nor
a decent man. Case closed! How do you feel about this?

Source: The Progressive Populist

And you can check this out as well.

Okay, he's the right man for the fascist state the wingnuts in charge envision., making him ahead of his time. Just the wrong man for now....

Of course he's wromg about every way possible, but the confirmation (so to speak) still seems assured.