The Senate Judiciary Committe begins its hearings on the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court next Monday,
January 9, 2006. So please forgive the ScAlito overload.
In a NYTimes Op Ed, Reagan Solicitor General Charles Fried attempts to defend and praise Alito. By my lights, he buried him. Consider these two parts of his piece:
My predecessor, Rex Lee, had been criticized within the Reagan administration for not directly opposing Roe, given that the department had more or less officially assumed the position that the case had been wrongly decided. At the time, this was hardly a radical stance. Mainstream legal thinkers, including the Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox and John Hart Ely, the dean of Stanford Law School, espoused it. And Judge Alito's memo made clear that he agreed.
So what is your point Fried? The memo is evidence that Alito believes Roe was wrongly decided. That's our point. How did we distort that? Fried continues:
But Mr. Lee's critics claimed that the solicitor general too readily followed the advice of career lawyers on his staff, many of whom were hostile to the Reagan agenda, especially on Roe, and used highly technical arguments to undermine it.
It is hardly surprising, then, that Judge Alito took pains to deny any personal hostility to a project that he was recommending should be once again postponed.
Come again? It is not surprising that Alito made sure that Republican political figures understood that he was in favor of overturning Roe? And? How have we distorted that? We say the memo is proof that Alito wants to overturn Roe. You appear to agree with our interpretation. Unless your point is that Alito was just "polishing the apple" or worse, plain lying. That in fact he is hostile to overturning Roe. And unfortunately, given Alito's response to Senator Feinstein on why he was so proud of his work on attempting to overturn Roe - to wit, he was trying to get a job with Ed Meese and was saying what he thought Meese wanted to hear - that is, unfortunately, a very plausible story. Like Clarence Thomas, Alito appears to have trouble with the truth.
Nice work Fried.