Judge Alito’s ability to avoid Democrats’ questions during his confirmation hearing leaves many to believe he’ll declare himself for the upcoming NFL draft. While this may sound funny, the future of our country is at risk as a result.
I was not very impressed with Alito during the hearings. Although many pundits and even politicians have stated that they didn’t really find anything worth filibustering about, I did. Specifically his answers to Sen. Kennedy about his prior pledge to recuse himself from cases involving Vanguard. Specifically, Kennedy asked Alito about how long his pledge of recusal would last:
You made a pledge to the Senate — effectively, to the American people — that you were going to recuse yourself. Now you say, well, it was just for any initial time, and I think 12 years is more than I really had in mind — you just qualified your answer.
That, in my mind, constitutes a lie. If you pledge to do something without qualifying how long that pledge is to last, doesn’t it stand to reason that your pledge can be interpreted to be a lifetime pledge? I understand the limits of human frailty and our inherent weaknesses, but a judge that makes decisions daily that could potentially affect their ability to be fair has to be above those issues of human weaknesses in order to be truly fair. Alito, regardless of his statements about “trying to personally go above and beyond the code”, has proven that he can’t and won’t do that. There are obviously other things from the hearings and from his legal opinions and rulings that are very disturbing as well, but this was just one issue that showed me what he could be like on the Supreme Court.
As has been mentioned by Dems, liberals, and progressives for a couple of years now, the Democratic Party needs to grow some balls. We, as a party and as a country, have been getting steamrolled by the current crop of legislators that call themselves the Republican Party ever since they won back Congress during Clinton’s second term. As an aside, Alexander Strategy Group which is closing up shop as a result of the Abramoff-Delay scandals, had a quote posted somewhere in their building that basically said “If you don’t define yourself, you will be defined by your enemies.” That is what has happened with the Democratic Party. The Steve Miller Band also had a line in the song Jet Airliner that says “You got to go through Hell before you get to Heaven”. We haven’t even begun to get close to going through hell yet as a political party. I say filibuster Alito’s nomination. Force Frist’s hand to invoke the so-called nuclear (nucular for the Bush-types) option. Then, and only then, will I consider our party as having balls again. If not, then we need to can the whole damn crew.
