Text 17239, 63 rader
Skriven 2006-01-13 10:58:04 av BOB SAKOWSKI (1:123/140)
Ärende: Food for thought
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January 12, 2006
A piece missing
Posted by Michael O'Hare

I have been dipping into the Alito hearings, not following them completely,
but enough to form a distinct and I think a fair impression. I read the
nominee as a competent, careful, capable legal craftsman, unprejudiced as
regards religion or race, and a decent guy. He is greatly favored with
petty (not trivial) virtues, such as his personal treatment of colleagues
and strong proclivity to neither steal nor lie nor mistreat children (at
least children present in person). He is not a lunatic reactionary, not a
flamethrowing hater, and though he doesn't come across as very interesting,
I'd be happy to have him living next door. He is really smart in the
specific sense of IQ.

I also have a sense of a man with, as my friend Ed Reilly once said of
another public figure of our acquaintance, an "unrelenting instinct for the
capillary". He was described by various witnesses, some admiringly, as
always deciding cases on the narrowest possible grounds. This is generally
a virtue in a judge, but not always and especially not always in a judge of
high or highest appellate jurisdiction. Brown v. Board of Education could
have been decided like Plessy, or so narrowly as to demand only (say) equal
per-pupil spending, but that wouldn't necessarily have been a better
holding. Alito knows the law, but he doesn't seem to know, or care about,
The Law. Every issue in the hearings was immediately reduced by the nominee
to a technical question of almost bureaucratic rule manipulation. This
approach is a good one for nearly all the cases courts hear, but it's not
what the Supreme Court is about.


He doesn't have a screw loose; what he has is a piece missing,
conspicuously, radiantly, displaying the absence of any sense of, well,
justice. Not a case came up for discussion in which he registered that one
or another outcome was just wrong, outrageous to a sense of decency, or to
him. He's on record in a memo as believing that to shoot an eighth grader,
known not to be armed, who was trying to climb over a fence in escape, is a
proper use of deadly force by a policeman. In a discussion of immigration
cases that have been regularly occasioning inexcusable, vile, un-American
heartbreak on people who missed obscure deadlines or violated arcane
requirements, all he could say was that the courts get bad transcripts and
it was hard to find translators for some of the plaintiffs, but that was a
problem for Congress. It wasn't exactly Pilate washing his hands, but the
man appears to be completely comfortable dealing with frightful social
wrongs by moving the issue down the hall to another office. Sometimes the
Court has to do this, but to Alito it's an especially good day's work, not
a disappointment.

A smart, decent, small man. If the US Supreme Court is a good place for a
man whose ability to prove "not my job" is unparalleled, Alito should be
confirmed. He will focus enormous rational power on issues not central to
the cases before him, and solve problems peripheral to the work we need the
court to do.

Afterthought: What lamebrain had the idea of trotting out sitting judges
whose holdings would be under Alito's review if he's confirmed to say how
wonderful he is? And how can the word of someone dense enough to agree to
do this carry any weight at all...don't these guys have any sense of
shame...or dignity?
[snip]

About says it all.
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