Upcoming Alito Conformation Hearings

This post got mixed in wih the Christmas postings. I'll move it to Dec. 29.

While Congress in recess both sides are gearing up for a battle over the next Supreme Court nominee. Though Congress and the Senate typically give the President his choice, many legislators are concerned over Alito's mega-conservative stance on wiretaps, civil rights, labor, abortion, rights of foreigners, gun ownership, and other issues.

Wiretaps As a lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department, Alito argued that the nation's top law enforcement official deserves blanket protection from lawsuits when acting in the name of national security, even when those actions involve the illegal wiretapping of American citizens, documents released yesterday show.

Civil Rights. The groups that oppose Alito include the NAACP,the Mexican-America Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Change to Win, and the AFL-CIO. In 1985 Judge Alito disagreed in writing with the concept of “one man, one vote.” In 2000 he voted to uphold an anti-affirmative action decision of a lower court. In 1997 he strongly disagreed with a Third Circuit ruling and made it clear that he supports impossibly high barriers for victims of discrimination to have their cases heard. In 1997, he ruled that striking all African Americans from the jury of a case involving an African American man and the death penalty was irrelevant and likened it to a recent study showing that a disproportionate number of recent Presidents have been left-handed. In 2004, Judge Alito dissented from a ruling against police officers who had strip-searched a woman and her 10-year-old daughter while executing a search warrant authorizing the search of her husband and their home.

Environmentalism For the first time since Judge Bork's nomination in 1987, The Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, National Environmental Trust, Greenpeace and Earthjustice all oppose Aito. "Like Judge Bork, Judge Alito has an extreme record on issues that are central to fundamental legal safeguards for public health and our environment, including the scope of the Commerce Clause, which is the constitutional basis for most federal environmental laws," the groups said.

Abortion. However they feel personally about abortion, most Americans will be alarmed that judge Alito has written that, "the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion." The implication here is that women do not have the right to their own bodies.

Rights of foreigners. As a senior lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department, Alito argued that immigrants who enter the United States illegally and foreigners living outside their countries are not entitled to the constitutional rights afforded to Americans. Also, Alito gave his approval to an FBI effort in the 1980s to collect from Canadian authorities fingerprint cards of Iranian and Afghan refugees living in that country.

Gun Control the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence says, "Judge Alito's nomination poses serious dangers to the safety of our communities, our families, and our children, as evidenced by his troubling dissent in U.S. vs. Rybar..... In that case, Judge Alito argued that the federal machine gun ban amounted to an unconstitutional exercise of Congressional power under the Commerce Clause. Alito attempted to erect arbitrary hurdles to Congressional efforts to reduce the availability of machine guns to the criminal element."

What can Bluenecks do? Sign this petition and let your senator know that you oppose the confirmation of judicial extremists like Alito.