Judge Alito: Ick
There is a new candidate to play Two-Face in the next Batman movie. He's a nominee for the Supreme Court.
Judge Samuel Alito seems to say whatever any group he's speaking to wants to hear. Some people are two-faced. This fellow seems to have three or four or five or six. In explaining his decision to rule on a case involving a personal investment of his, despite having sworn under oath before the Senate never to do so, Judge Alito had already offered six mutually contradictory explanations. The one thing Judge Alito has going for him is his many faces are bland and, if anything, more boring than the Senators who are questioning him. (His opinions on the other hand are certainly colorful, even bizarre: This is a guy who is okay with strip-searching a nine-year-old, under the theory that the police had a "reasonable belief" that a child, in her own home, was a hard-core drug dealer.) One would expect someone with his history of, at least, an indifference to racism and sexism would be less, well, boring. Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter tried to describe Alito's performance as a sort of dance: "A minuet," he offered, and later "maybe a fox trot". He seemed to sense his simile lacked something. Judge Alito is surely a lead-footed plodder.
It was telling that John Roberts spent several hours each with a number of Senators before his Supreme Court hearing, while few Senators got as much as a half hour with Samuel Alito. Roberts had the advantage of being, basically, likable. Alito is the sort of guy who makes everyone happier, and every room seem brighter, when he leaves.
The Democratic line continues to be that Judge Alito is fundamentally dishonest, and no one can reasonably believe anything he says in the hearings. This presents a trap for Alito: The only way he could disprove it is to speak with a frankness which would cost him more votes than his dull evasiveness. Alexander Pope wrote a great, and very funny, poem called The Dunciad, which is about the triumph of dullness. It has been much on my mind during the hearings.
He appears to believe that the President can do no wrong. That the President can conduct illegal searches, that he can torture--he has even in the past used the word "supremacy" to describe the President's role in government. He is an extremist, and an activist juror, albeit an activist in drab. But he's no less dangerous for being uninteresting.
6:01:53 PM 
|
|
