Meek, Mild & Menacing

By Sidney Blumenthal
Salon.com

[SNIP]

When Alito served in the Justice Department, he argued that the federal government had no responsibility for the "health, safety and welfare" of the American people (a view rejected by President Reagan); that "the Constitution does not protect the right to an abortion"; that the executive branch should be immune from liability for illegal domestic wiretapping; that illegal immigrants have no "fundamental rights"; and that police had a right to kill an unarmed 15-year-old boy accused of stealing $10, a view rejected by the Supreme Court and every police group that filed briefs in the case. He also wrote a memo arguing that it would be legal for employers to fire and for the federal government to exclude from any of its funded programs people afflicted with AIDS because of "fear of contagion whether reasonable or not."

As a judge, he has ruled consistently for employers against individual and civil rights, and for unbridled executive and police power. Against the majority of his court and six other federal courts, he argued that regulation of machine guns by the federal government was unconstitutional. He approved the strip search of a mother and her 10-year-old daughter although they were not named in a warrant, a decision denounced by then federal Judge Michael Chertoff, now secretary of homeland security, as a "cliché rubber stamp." Alito ruled in favor of a law requiring women to notify their husbands if they plan to have an abortion, which was overturned by the Supreme Court on the vote of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who stated, "A State may not give to a man the kind of dominion over his wife that parents exercise over their children."

Alito's decisions and dissents predictably flow from his politics. On the Supreme Court, as O'Connor's replacement, he will codify the authoritarianism of the Bush presidency even after it is gone.

FULL STORY