Career of the Alito marked by hatred of liberalism (Sid Blumenthal)

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George Bush's rough justice

The career of the latest supreme court nominee has been marked by his hatred of liberalism

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday January 12, 2006
The Guardian

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Few public figures since Nixon have worn their resentment so obviously as Alito. The son of a civil servant, he attended Princeton and Yale law school. "Both opened up new worlds of ideas," he testified. "But this was in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a time of turmoil at colleges and universities. And I saw some very smart and privileged people behaving irresponsibly."

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.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1684247,00.html

They all are. They can say what ever they want, they are all Nazis.

:kick:

Interesting. Some might say that nothing elevates one from nothing to something like a government job. It would certainly be a matter of pride in the immigrant community. It could also give the job holder a certain amount of clout, especially in ward politics.

I observed this sort of scenario personally in New Jersey where my Dad was involved in politics - his interaction with the Italian community was vital to winning.