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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KonKilo who wrote (8676)	1/10/2006 7:39:57 PM
From: MrLucky	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 541658

newsmax.com Alito Is Well Prepared for Hearings Susan Estrich Monday, Jan. 9, 2006 My heart says he could flop, but my head says he can't lose: a Little League coach from New Jersey with a Major League brain who knows more about this stuff than all the people reading the questions, and then some, and plays these games every day. The guy who has been preparing for this for weeks, with smart people actually playing the part of senators. A real person with working-class roots and down-home appeal, in the wake of a working-class disaster. You know who I mean. Sam Alito, the guy next door with the mega-brain, the tough former prosecutor up for the Supreme Court. The Alito Show opens Monday in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The real battle is the country: Will they hate they guy? Will they decide that he's passable? Or is it possible that they could actually fall for him? Sure, he's not as polished or as blow-dried as John Roberts. But he's every bit as smart, which is a triumph for the 99.9 percent of us who are also not as polished and blow-dried as the new chief, either. He's more a working-class hero. The Alito family lives in a big house in an unfancy neighborhood in New Jersey. He sits as a judge in Newark. He's never been in it for the money. He has spent his life in government service – in the Justice Department, as a prosecutor, as an appellate judge. This week, he was rated "well qualified" by the ABA, which is its best category. For the last few weeks, Alito has been taking his "murder boards," reportedly faring quite well under the grilling of top Republican lawyers who actually understand the law, which is more than you can really expect the Senate Democrats who will quiz him on the intricacies of constitutional law to do. They won't. They'll be reading questions. The deck is stacked in his favor. He is the only legal scholar in the crowd. And no matter how many brilliant staffers and law professors contribute to writing each question, if the person asking it isn't prepared to follow up, to engage, to keep going at it, it doesn't matter. The judge reportedly had a way of pleasantly throwing the question back, and with a senator, that could really explode. So, how could he lose? It's possible, which is why politics is a sport with consequences. Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee is not exactly the same as sitting on the bench yourself and asking the questions, which is where Judge Alito has mostly been. He loses if he gets portrayed as a committed ideologue. He loses if he gets trapped defending his own words advocating the overruling of Roe vs. Wade. In a very smart op-ed piece this week, my friend and former colleague Charles Fried attempts to defang two of Alito's former memoranda, with some success. Alito must do so himself, with the good humor of middle age – he loses if he is arrogant and defensive. Just the work of a professional lawyer, ma'am, and a young one. Judge Bork is sitting where he is because of his inability to do just that. He also loses if he becomes the symbol of the Bush administration on issues of privacy and powers of war, issues that are of fundamental importance to the Bush administration and its opponents. Alito may be the only one with a strong interest in keeping his hearings totally out of the larger debates. But it's not really possible. The issues are on the court's docket, and if it is wrong to ask Alito how he would rule on particular cases, it certainly becomes of paramount importance to understand what approach and views he brings to this area. If he answers as a Republican senator or a Justice Department spokesman would, he becomes the poster boy that he doesn't want to be. How he deals with questions in the area the senators know best (because it has been the subject of partisan attack) is likely to shape these hearings far more than the much-anticipated back-and-forth about Roe vs. Wade, which has probably been rehearsed a hundred times already.