Frustration, Alito style

When I posted yesterday about my annoyance that confirmation hearings have become little more than a test to see if a nominee will blow his cool, this is just what I had in mind. Alito's non-answers are excruciating, and contrary to common sense they're just what will give him a pass. You'd think that a guy would get nailed in a big way for ducking questions and generally avoiding straight talk. Nope. Now it's just the thing that carries the day.

Defending his refusal to offer his current view on Roe v. Wade, Samuel Alito just said that litigants who bring the issue of abortion before the Supreme Court in the future have "a right" to have their case heard by justices with open minds, "and that means people who haven't announced in advance what they think about the issue."

The problem, of course, is that Alito has already "announced in advance" what he thinks about the issue. In his 1985 application for a political appointment in the Justice Department, Alito suggested that he "personally" believed "very strongly" in the positions he had advanced in the Solicitor General's Office -- in particular, the argument that the "Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion."

Alito won't say whether he still believes what he believed in 1985 because, he says, it would be the "antithesis" of a fair legal system if judges told litigants that they'd made up their minds before a case is even heard. But isn't it equally antithetical if the judge has already made up his mind but pretends that he hasn't?

Furthermore, Alito is on the record as saying that Robert Bork was the best-qualified nominee of the century. Which suggests that his judicial philosophy is right in line with a bigoted, corporatist, pro-big government stance. Which in turn suggests that he isn't a Democrat or a Republican, but a neo-fascist. And he's set to sail straight through barring some seriously gutsy questioning from Dems. I'm not optimistic. Witness Adam Nagourney's ass-kissing coverage in the NYT (just one example), which portrays Alito as an unflappable intellectual being forced to play tiddlywinks with Democrats who are only worried about... the impact upon the lives of the American public for the next fifty years or so, I guess.