http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/01/11/alito_confirmation_hearings/ ...The daylong circus of missed opportunities made me long for the days when John Edwards sat on the Judiciary Committee. Unique among congressional inquisitors, Edwards had actually faced a jury as a lawyer recently enough to still remember his courtroom tricks. During Bush's first term, I twice watched with awe as Edwards trapped Attorney General John Ashcroft in an embarrassing knot of contradictions over military tribunals and enemy combatants. But nothing like that happened Tuesday. Instead, the Democrats squandered the first round of questioning without coming up with a politically appealing rationale to justify a Senate filibuster against Alito, the only plausible strategy for stopping the nomination.
In a reflection of either overconfidence or a shrewd recognition of his limitations as a public figure, Alito spent the long day refraining from any attempt to make himself charming, colorful or even interesting. Gone was the man-of-the-people number from Alito's opening statement Monday, which stressed his blue-collar New Jersey roots. In its place was Alito as the Law Student from Hell, the geek who memorized every bit of case law in the library without developing a single opinion that would make him an intriguing dinner-party companion.
During the hearing, the legal phrase "stare decisis" (rough meaning: Previous precedents are authoritative) was uttered so often that I began imagining a particularly outspoken porn star named Starry Decisive. In the ritual dance over abortion, a judicial nominee who affirms a deep belief in stare decisis is saying, in effect, that he or she will not overturn Roe v. Wade.
But when Arlen Specter, the GOP committee chairman who favors abortion rights, raced down this time-worn path with the hearing's open bell, the nominee did not do much to be reassuring. Alito pledged his troth to stare decisis, but then immediately hedged: "It's not an inexorable command, but it is a general presumption that courts are going to follow prior precedents." The word "inexorable" is the one pregnant with the hidden meaning. As Ryan Lizza recently pointed out in the New Republic, Justice Louis Brandeis declared in 1935 that precedent (OK, he used that pesky two-word Latin phrase) "is not a universal, inexorable command." Getting back to abortion, Chief Justice William Rehnquist quoted Brandeis in his 1992 dissent in the Casey case, the decision that affirmed Roe v. Wade. So when Alito said "inexorable," he was seemingly signaling that he agreed with Rehnquist that Roe should be overturned.
Somehow it is hard to imagine a dynamite television commercial built around Alito's use of "inexorable." That truth encapsulates the daunting challenge facing Senate Democrats. There are valid reasons to oppose Alito (from abortion rights to his exaggerated respect for the powers of the presidency), but after two days of Judiciary Committee hearings, it is still Eight Democrats in Search of a Story Line.
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