In his Sunday
column [Should the Senate Vote on Alito’s Ideology?]
Steve Chapman directly attacks the Committee for Justice (CFJ)
for claiming that we support Judge Alito because he is one of
the most qualified judges ever to be nominated to the Supreme
Court and is a paragon of judicial modesty and restraint, when
really we support him because we are looking for a judge to oppose
the American Civil Liberties Union’s positions on flag burning
and internet child pornography.
Mr. Chapman’s
(willful?) misunderstanding of our position both on Judge Alito
and our opposition to the coalition of extremist left-wing groups
that are trying to undermine his nomination, is poor support for
his absurd assertion later in the article that Senators should
vote on judicial nominees based on whether or not the “ideology”
of the judge in question matches their own views on a variety
of topics.
First, we support
Judge Alito, as stated above, because of his experience and the
fact that he is one of the most respected legal minds in the country.
Moreover, as a former federal prosecutor he brings to the court
experience that no other current sitting justice has, experience
that is all the more important considering the legal issues that
have come up in the War on Terror.
Furthermore, CFJ
supports Alito because we feel that he will be a neutral interpreter
of established law and will not fall prey to grandiose delusions
that a Supreme Court justice should be a philosopher-king, writing
new law and changing social and economic policy. We are satisfied
that Alito is not an ideologue, but rather a “pro-law”
judge who does not decide cases based on policy preferences or
which litigant garners more sympathy, but rather rules for the
party that has the law on its side.
We also believe that
elections should actually matter. Not only President Bush, but
several Republicans Senators have run on issue of putting constitutionalist
judges on the federal bench. As a result the President won re-election,
and the GOP has a solid majority in the Senate. It is not only
the President’s responsibility; it is also his duty to nominate
the kind of judges he promised to America during the election.
In short, we endorse
Alito because he is the opposite of the results-oriented judge
the Left needs to advance an agenda which has consistently lost
at the ballot box. It is this agenda that we seek to expose in
our most recent ads and white paper. The constant refrain of these
Left-wing groups and their puppets in the Senate is that Alito
(or Roberts, or Bork, or whomever they’re attacking) is
“out of the mainstream.” We seek to inform the public
of the views these Left-wing groups hold and ask, “Who truly
is out of the mainstream of American opinion?”
Apparently, judicial
activism makes strange bedfellows, because the supposedly libertarian
Mr. Chapman apparently takes the side of liberals like Ted Kennedy,
Dick Durbin and Ralph Neas in claiming that ideology is what matters
in a judicial appointment. “I won’t deny that ideology
matters to me,” Mr. Chapman sanctimoniously declares. It
seems Mr. Chapman is OK with liberals installing social activists
on the federal bench, just so long as he gets to vote for someone
who would read his laissez-faire economic viewpoint into the Constitution.
The practical result
of Mr. Chapman’s view is that the Senate, in conflict with
the Appointments Clause of the Constitution, would become a co-equal
partner with the President in selecting who would sit on the federal
bench. Since, as Mr. Chapman would have it, each Senator would
vote based on his or her ideology, the President would be forced
to select a judge with either no record at all, or a record that
reflects the ideology of the majority of the Senate at that time.
Under this regime not only would Robert Bork have been rejected,
but so would have Justices Stevens, Kennedy, Thomas, Souter and
Breyer.
The history of the
Senate makes it clear that not only was ideology not a consideration
in the nomination process, but that the President’s selections
for the federal bench were given great deference. Indeed, it was
not until 1955 that Senate hearings on Supreme Court appointments
became standard procedure. Even in the 1980’s nominees like
Antonin Scalia, whose prior pronouncements would cause uproar
if he were nominated today, were unanimously confirmed by the
Senate. The fact of the matter is that ideology has never been
part of the judicial selection process until recently and it’s
not something we should welcome.
Judge Alito
should be confirmed because he is exactly what the Supreme Court
and the country needs: An experienced, modest judge of even temperament,
unquestionable integrity and great intellect who will help the
court move toward a more restrained, less politicized path.
John
Kalinger writes at the Committee
for Justice Blog.
