Out of My Mind

As we in the legal biz are often forced to put it, the the whatever speaks for itself.

In Alito's case, his unfitness for a seat on the Supreme Court is based on his record: writings and judicial decisions.

Of course, the wingnuts do not have a substantive response, just agitprop and worse.

Id he was OK for the appeallate bench years ago he must be just as approvable now. No, now he has a record as a judge and that changes everything.

Or, better: all those writings of Alito's, well, they're inoperative, they were never true, just some sort of babble.

Whatever.

But for lucidity, here's this which, it's safe to say, hasnt been seen enough:

Attacks On Analysis Of Alito Record Are Pure Politics

Paul Janensch
News Media

January 19 2006

Q: Professor News, what do you think of the Republican attacks on the Knight Ridder Newspapers' story analyzing Samuel Alito's record as a federal judge?

A: Not much. The story, the result of a careful reading of Alito's 15 years on the federal bench, was based on facts. The attacks were based on politics.

The story concluded that Alito was a judicial conservative. Some leading Republicans took exception to this characterization, which seems strange.

The piece, by Stephen Henderson and Howard Mintz, was sent Dec. 1 by the Knight Ridder Washington bureau to the 32 Knight Ridder newspapers and some 300 other newspapers that subscribe to the Knight Ridder Tribune News Service.

Within days, the Republican Senate Conference issued a memo that said the piece misrepresented Alito's record. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said in a letter published by The Philadelphia Inquirer, a Knight Ridder newspaper, that the story was "neither objective nor accurate."

The story was mentioned during the Senate hearings on Alito's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, although viewers of the tedious proceedings may have missed it amid the bloviating by Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee and the bland, noncommittal responses by the nominee.

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., made a reference to the story. Then Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said the story "had been thoroughly discredited."

Another attack on the story came from the Republican National Committee, which said reporter Henderson must be biased because he had once been an editorial writer.

What exactly did the story say to upset Alito backers? It said that during his 15 years on the federal bench, Alito "has worked quietly but resolutely to weave a conservative legal agenda into the fabric of the nation's laws."

After examining all of Alito's 311 published opinions and interviewing legal scholars, Henderson, Knight Ridder's Supreme Court specialist, and Mintz, of the San Jose Mercury News, came to this conclusion: "Although Alito's opinions are rarely written with obvious ideology, he's seldom sided with a criminal defendant, a foreign national facing deportation, an employee alleging discrimination or consumers suing big business."

Is that so shocking? Alito was nominated by a president who promised to name conservatives to the high court and who has said that the two justices he admires the most are conservatives Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Perhaps the Republican critics of the Knight Ridder analysis wanted only conservatives to know that Alito is a conservative but wanted everyone else to think he has a totally open mind and no political views.

In defense of the story, Clark Hoyt, Knight Ridder's Washington editor, wrote that "fact-based reporting is under more relentless assault than at any time in my more than 40 years in Washington." He deplored a trend of attacking the messenger rather than debating issues.

He said it is unhealthy that zealous partisans in both parties have adopted a "with us or against us" syndrome. The job of journalists, he said, "is to be neither with them nor against them. It's to find out the facts as best we can and to report them as fully, fairly and accurately as we can."

I couldn't have put it better.

Paul Janensch is a former newspaper editor who teaches journalism at Quinnipiac University. His column appears on the first and third Thursday of every month. He can be heard at 8:35 a.m. Thursdays on the five stations of WNPR Connecticut Public Radio, including 90.5 in Hartford. E-mail: paul.janensch@quinnipiac.edu.

Copyright 2006, Hartford Courant