Night Court: The Dark Vision of Samuel Alito

Thursday, 12 January 2006
"False-hearted judges, dying in the webs that they spin;/Only a matter of time before night comes stepping in." -- Bob Dylan, "Jokerman"

Here is Sidney Blumenthal, on fire and on target against Bush judicial bagman Samuel Alito in the Guardian: George Bush's Rough Justice. Excerpts:

[Alito is a fervent acolyte of] the radical notion of the "unitary executive"" -- that the president, as commander-in-chief, is sole judge of the law, unbound by hindrances such as the Geneva conventions, and has inherent authority to subordinate independent government agencies to his fiat. This is the cornerstone of the Bush legal doctrine...

The "unitary executive" is nothing less than "gospel", declared the federal judge Samuel Alito in 2000 - it is a theory that "best captures the meaning of the constitution's text and structure". Alito's belief was perhaps the paramount credential for his nomination by Bush to the supreme court.

In his application to the Reagan justice department, Alito wrote that his interest in constitutional law was "motivated in large part by disagreement with Warren court decisions ... particularly in the area ... of reapportionment" - which established the principle of one person, one vote. Alito's law career has been a long effort to reverse the liberalism of the Warren supreme court.

In the Reagan justice department, he argued that the federal government had no responsibility for the "health, safety and welfare" of Americans (a view rejected by Reagan); that "the constitution does not protect the right to an abortion"; that the executive should be immune from liability for illegal domestic wiretapping; that illegal immigrants have no "fundamental rights"; that police had a right to kill an unarmed 15-year-old accused of stealing $10 (a view rejected by the supreme court and every police group that filed in the case); and that it should be legal to fire, and exclude from funded federal programmes, people with Aids, because of "fear of contagion ... reasonable or not".

Against the majority of his court and six other federal courts, he argued that federal regulation of machine guns was unconstitutional. He approved the strip search of a mother and her daughter although they were not named in a warrant, a decision denounced by fellow judge Michael Chertoff, now secretary of homeland security. And Alito backed a law requiring women to tell husbands if they want an abortion, which was overturned by the supreme court on the vote of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor,

On the supreme court, as O'Connor's replacement, he will codify the authoritarianism of the Bush presidency, even after it is gone.

Link Here