babbling blue

Today Samuel Alito was confirmed as the 110th Supreme Court justice. This was expected, but it’s not good.

The vote was 58-42. The following 4 senators from the Democratic party voted for Alito:

• Robert Byrd of West Virginia
• Tim Johnson of South Dakota
• Ben Nelson of Nebraska
• Kent Conrad of North Dakota

I doubt any of their constituents are going to read my blog, but on the chance that they do, I encourage them to keep this betrayal in mind during the next election.

Why do I say betrayal? Because Alito is not a good thing for this country.

In the words of Robert W. Gordon, Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and Legal History at Yale:

But wherever there is running room - opened up by gaps in application, conflicts in precedents, ambiguities in statutes - Alito is an activist who works steadily to push the law well beyond conventional boundaries of precedent. There is nothing “restrained” about his opinions proposing to strike down one federal law banning machine guns for exceeding Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause (U.S. v. Rybar, 1996); to strike down another mandating employers to grant medical leave to parents of newborn children for exceeding Congress’s power under the Fourteenth Amendment (Chittister, 2000); and to construe regulatory and civil rights laws so restrictively as to frustrate their purposes. He is for “limited government” and “federalism” when those principles point to less regulation of business and religious expression; but for authoritarian government when it acts in the causes of protecting national security or law enforcement and regulating morals. He is in short a judge with an agenda, and the agenda is not “conservative” but right-wing-Republican.

Emphasis mine. I suggest you read the whole thing. Alito has an agenda, and it’s not one that’s good for most Americans.

Unfortunately the Democratic party is weak and lacks cohesiveness right now. They weren’t able to pull together a filibuster to hold Alito at bay. So now the Supreme Court shifts farther to the right, and another supporter of Bush (and executive power in general) is on it. We could be in trouble.