Defeat-o Alito

Yikes. I have a very bad feeling about our chances against this Judge Alito character. It's not looking good. Even some of the Democrats who are supporting the fillibuster are saying that it's essentially a lost cause. All over the blogsophere, people are arguing with clarity and force that the Senate should reject the nomination of Sam Alito to the Supreme Court.

The problem is, this one's not up for an open vote. 100 Senators will make the call. And, as you've probably heard, 55 of them have sworn allegiance to El Chimpancé Presidente-Por-Vida, George W. Bush. So, they'll do whatever he says. If Dick Cheney went on Meet the Press next week and suggested that it might behoove Republican Senators to light their genitals on fire, every burn unit in Washington would start stocking extra gauze.

Even so, Republicans would need 60 votes to override a fillibuster and force a vote. That means that the Democrats could actually defeat veto if they were all on the same page. They're not. Some of these rat bastards are siding with the enemy. Can you believe Ken Salazar from Colorado is voting for Alito? The guy just got elected! Doesn't the White House have enough cabana boys at this point?



Come on, this guy's obviously just trying to suck up to the President. First he's refusing to support a fillibuster of Altio, and now he's dressing like Randolph Scott for photos. Seriously, dude, a bolo tie? Even Hank Hill would find that outfit gauche.

[Thanks to my personal favorite political blog, Firedoglake, for the picture of Salazar there.]

Here's what it comes down to...Under normal circumstances, I would probably agree with the centrist Democrats who don't want to make a big, pointless show of fillibustering Alito when he's just going to be confirmed anyway. You pick your battles, you don't want to seem like obstructionists who play politics, yada yada yada. It seems to make pragmatic sense to just let this one slide and focus on getting more Democrats in Congress later this year.

But this thinking is incorrect in the case of Alito for two reasons:

(1) As Sen. Barack Obama rightly pointed out on ABC's This Week, Alito's views differ sharply from the views of the majority of Americans when it comes to basic issues that will face the Supreme Court. Issues like abortion rights, the right to privacy and the authority of the Executive in times of war. This isn't just some legal issue about technicalities of Senate procedure or "up and down votes." This is a guy Bill Frist has called "the liberal Democrat's worst nightmare." Unfortunately for most Americans, they mainly agree with liberal Democrats on this stuff, whether they know it or not.

(2) Geoffrey Stone writes about this second point more eloquently than I can on the Huffington post. You should check out his comments about Alito. Basically, he says, and I concur, that Alito is a particularly bad justice for the present time, because he is beholden to a president who has demonstrated time and again a desire to amass executive power while increasing secrecy, as well as a pointed refusal to respect the rule of law.

Just one of these situations would be bad enough. I wouldn't want a justice who tends to defer to the president in all cases, and I wouldn't want a president determined to override precedent in a variety of bizarre, outlandish power grabs of questionable legality. But the combination of these two circumstances, what we'll have for the next 3 years if Alito is confirmed, is extraordinarily dangerous. I'd go so far as to call it toxic.

While you're over there at HuffPo, why not check out John Kerry's comments on the Alito matter. He's much easier to read than listen to, because you don't have to focus on how he creepily doesn't move his face while he talks.