The majority of stuff I've been reading here at Dkos about our friend Scalito has centered on two things: The infamous 1985 memo about Roe V. Wade and the Concerned Alumni of Princeton stuff involving the racism and sexism. And that stuff is very important, don't get me wrong. But in all the abortion fuss that engulfs every nominee that comes out, we are forgetting a few things. Dahlia Lithwick has an excellent article in Slate that I think should be widely read- link in extended. I'm going to summarize and comment on it, because I think it's a critical thing for this community (hell, for the country) but I strongly suggest you read it.....
http://www.slate.com/...
As Mrs. Lithwick points out, this is the one common thread between Roberts, the ill-fated Meiers, and Alito: They are all big cheerleaders for executive power. They've all had conflicting and varying views on abortion, and they've all tried to hide the substance (or lack of it) of those views from the public, but the common thread among these nominees is not abortion- we are all so paranoid about Bush giving his conservative base the court that overturns Roe that we're forgetting the other, and in some ways scarier, fetish of this white house, civil rights in police and criminal proceedings.
If you look back at rulings involving privacy, state's rights, and civil rights in the past three years, every conservative on the court- even Thomas, Scalia, and Rhenquist, who freaked everybody out by defending the Federal Marriage and Leave Act- has had a moment where, at some point, they blinked. They did not support the bizarre claims of Republican plaintiffs and administrations, they all either admitted that there was a civil protection provided by the constitution or they discovered a small libertarian streak and voted to limit police powers. Alito has no such compunctions. The headline of the article is "he never met a search warrant he didn't like" and I have to admit, it sure seems like it. This is the man who upheld that shooting a clearly unarmed 15-year old boy in the head as he fled the scene of a minor felony was not placing an "undue restriction" on him or violating his civil rights- Alito asserted that the boy had no protection under the constitution when he wrote a memo about this case, and even the right-wing branch of SCOTUS disagreed. This is the man who is OK with a ten-year-old girl being strip-searched at the scene of an investigation because apparently, a search warrant covers the internal cavities of people in the premises as well as the premises themselves. Hell, the guy was even OK with an FBI plan to collect fingerprints from Afghan and Iranian refugees in Canada, since as non-citizens they did not have US constitutional protection. Sound familiar?
There's more in the article. How Alito has not once voted for the defendant in a capital case. How he has come down on the side of the government in every case he's ever been on . And this is what worries me. We have all heard Bush, and the rest of the GOP, scream about how the courts are activist, legislating from the bench, yadda yadda. You know the drill. What this says to me is that he wants a court that will rubber-stamp every claim he's ever had to executive power. And Samuel Alito will give him that. And unless you like the end of habeas corpus, "black detention facilities" outside the USA, enemy combatants, and unreasonable searches and seizures not just there but here, that should scare you shitless.