THE ALITO HEARINGS

One of the many desperate gambits I have tried along my tortured career path was to spend a year in paralegal school, achieving a paralegal certificate.

This is roughly equivalent to the first year of law school. Although it doesn’t qualify me for anything more than a low-level litigation support position, I have worked in some pretty nice law firms and I have more than a passing acquaintance with such concepts as statutory law, decisions, common law, legal precedent, legal standing, judicial competence to decide cases…whatever.

I have worked on some big cases: Enron, asbestos poisoning and toxic torts involving birth defects arising from work in microprocessor clean rooms. The nature of these jobs has led me to read thousands and thousands of pages of documentation.

Does this qualify me to express an opinion about Alito? Absolutely. Does it lend any more weight to my opinion than that of Muhammed the Shish-Kebob Peddler? Let the reader decide!

I must say that the CNN commentators for the Alito hearing were not much help in interpreting the proceedings. When Alito conceded that evidence obtained by torture was inadmissible under the Fifth Amendment, Blitzer, Toubin and Greenfield, all attorneys, breathed a sigh of relief (this just shows you how far we as a country have deteriorated, that a thing like that would be in doubt at all), saying “At least he cleared THAT up!” Unfortunately, nobody brought up the obvious follow-up question, which provides a pretty big judicial loophole to jump through, namely “What constitutes torture?” This is a hairsplitting polemic that has bedeviled jurists in many countries, but these knuckleheads are totally oblivious to it!

My problem with attorneys is that their mental processes have been shaped by conformism to the consistency of American cheese. They are absolutely incapable of applying imaginative creativity to any subject. In the whole debate over NSA eavesdropping, nobody has raised the distinction between eavesdropping on suspected terrorists as opposed to, say, against protest organizers or hostile journalists. I must say that Senator Feingold raised a very important point when he expressed doubt that Alito would be a dependable defender of legislative prerogatives against executive encroachment.

Alito’s obvious political and judicial defects became clear enough when his past decisions were closely examined. Senator Schumer found opinions that Alito wrote making the government case where the government itself neglected to completely refine its arguments. Senator Feinstein, referring to a case involving federal jurisdiction over the illegal sale of assault weapons, recited an Alito opinion where he voted to throw out longstanding precedent in favor of a newly written decision loosening government regulation of interstate commerce. Feinstein is obviously concerned that once Alito ascends to the Supreme Court, he will try the same strategy on abortion, which he only grudgingly admits is supported by established precedent.

The executive and legislative branches of government are partisan political institutions, and so is the judicial branch, notwithstanding popular mythology that it is impartial. And Samuel Alito is a blatantly partisan political functionary. He has been a partisan Republican since he was a teenager. The fact that he decided to follow the legal route to power rather than the electoral route taken by other law school graduates, like the senators who interrogated him, is more a function of temperment and does not make him any less of a political animal. He has never had a private sector job. Despite the fact that these hearings have been described as a “job interview,” the fact is that these hearings are a political process prescribed by the Constitution in which a Republican administration is presenting a Republican attorney before a majority Republican senate for confirmation.

This does not mean that the minority Democrats have no cards to play. The Republicans are perilously close to melting down, particularly in light of the Jack Abramoff case. That is why the Republicans are trying to rush through the confirmation before the indictments start to rain down on the Republican congress as a result of Abramoff’s and Randy Cunningham’s cooperation with federal prosecutors.

For this reason, it would be in the interest of the Democrats to stall, drag their feet and delay the Alito confirmation until the sky falls down on the Republicans, destroying their authority and reducing them to shambles.

Then the Democrats will have a better chance to insist on a moderate compromise candidate whom they comfortably feel will not enforce a reactionary, statist concept of public policy for the future decades.

Tags:   None

© All rights reserved.

Posted on 1/12/2006 ( Permanent Link )
Read 402 Times
 Send to Friend