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Alito: seen as a pragmatic conservative
(Reuters)
Updated: 2006-01-15 11:08
WASHINGTON - Samuel Alito is poised to join a tradition of pragmatic justices
who have moved the Supreme Court to the right in measured steps.
President George W.
Bush at the Kentucky International Convention Center in Louisville,
Kentucky, January 11, 2006. Bush on Saturday called for a prompt Senate
vote on Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, playing down Democratic
concerns that he could tilt the high court too far to the right. Bush, in
his weekly radio address, emphasized Alito's judicial experience, saying
the judge approached the law in a 'thoughtful, fair, and open-minded way'
and would not impose his personal views. |
| Eighteen
hours of questions over four days showed President Bush's nominee to be a judge
respectful of legal precedent but hardly starry-eyed. Alito also displayed a
strong inclination toward executive authority, a trait not surprising for a
lifetime government employee and former Reagan Justice Department lawyer.
By the design of Bush administration officials and despite Democratic efforts
to smoke him out, almost nothing was learned in Senate confirmation hearings
about Alito's views on transcendent issues likely to come before the court, such
as abortion.
Instead, legal experts say, the hearings may have provided more understanding
of Alito's influence on the court's changing dynamics when he replaces retiring
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the decisive vote on abortion, affirmative action
and the death penalty.
For example, while Alito will fit comfortably in the conservative camp of
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas,
legal experts see him as being closer to Scalia than Thomas in his incremental
approach to overturning what the court has done before.
"Alito's not going to be a radical," said Christopher Wolfe, a political
science professor at Marquette University.
Bush, in his weekly radio address, said Alito was "a man of character and
intelligence" whose long legal career shows he is highly qualified for the
court.
Some experts cast Alito, a federal appeals court judge, in the tradition of
the late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist — a man so like-minded in some
respects that he cited Alito's reasoning in 1992 in a major abortion case.
More than a decade later, Alito would use Rehnquist's words from the case,
telling the Senate Judiciary Committee that the 1973 landmark ruling legalizing
abortion was an important precedent deserving of respect but that precedent was
not an "inexorable command."
Justice Louis Brandeis first used the term in 1932.
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