bush solution;rely on close personal associate or pander to his right wing

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NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/01/opinion/01tues1.html?th&emc=th

Another Lost Opportunity

Published: November 1, 2005

The nomination of Samuel Alito Jr. to the Supreme Court raises a lot of questions about the judge's attitudes toward federalism, privacy and civil rights. But it has already answered one big question about President Bush. Anyone wondering whether the almost endless setbacks and embarrassments the White House has suffered over the last year would cause Mr. Bush to fix his style of governing should realize that the answer is: no.

As a political candidate, Mr. Bush had an extremely useful ability to repeat the same few simple themes over and over. As president, he has been cramped by the same habit. The solution to almost every problem seems to be either to rely on a close personal associate or to pander to his right wing. When the first tactic failed to work with the Harriet Miers nomination, Mr. Bush resorted to the second. The Alito nomination has thrilled social conservatives, who regard the judge to be a surefire vote against abortion rights.

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The concerns about this particular nominee go beyond his apparent hostility to abortion, which was most graphically demonstrated in 1992 when his court ruled on what became known in the Supreme Court as the Casey decision. Judge Alito was the sole judge on his court who took the extreme position that all of Pennsylvania's limitations on abortion were constitutional, including the outrageous requirement that a woman show that she had notified her spouse.

Judge Alito has favored an inflated standard of evidence for racial- and sex-discrimination cases that would make it very hard even to bring them to court, much less win. In an employment case, he said that just for a plaintiff to have the right to a trial, she needed to prove that her employers did not really think they had chosen the best candidate for a job. When lawyers for a black death-row inmate sought to demonstrate bias in jury selection by using statistics, Judge Alito dismissed that as akin to arguing that Americans were biased toward left-handers because left-handed men had won five out of six of the preceding presidential elections.

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