Alito's America is not our America
Campus Progress is speaking out – join us.
By Amanda Angelotti, Campus Progress
Thursday December 8, 2005
Since President Bush nominated Judge Samuel Alito to take the place of retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, we’ve learned a lot about him. Unlike the previous two nominees, John Roberts and Harriet Miers, Alito has an extensive paper trail based largely on his 15-year record as a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. What overarching theme does it reveal? As Knight-Ridder reported last week:
Although Alito’s opinions are rarely written with obvious ideology, he’s seldom sided with a criminal defendant, a foreign national facing deportation, an employee alleging discrimination or consumers suing big businesses….[He] often goes out of his way to narrow the scope of individual rights, sometimes reaching out to undo lower-court rulings that affirmed those rights.
Judge Alito regularly defers to the authority of big business and government institutions and against individuals and their fundamental freedoms – from the strip-search of an innocent 10 year-old girl to an Iranian woman seeking political asylum in the U.S.; from the safety of workers in a coal-processing plant to an unarmed teenager fatally shot in the head by police while running from a $10 burglary; from a woman alleging workplace discrimination whom Alito acknowledged had been treated unfairly to a man on death row whom the Supreme Court later ruled had not received adequate legal representation.
And as Dahlia Lithwick points out in Slate, in light of Alito’s strikingly unbalanced deference to authority, it’s important to consider the one quality he shares with Roberts and Miers: the willingness to grant virtually unchecked power to the Executive Branch, particularly in wartime.
Today, Campus Progress and the American Progress Action Fund are launching “Alito’s America,” a new campaign that takes an edgy look at the serious consequences of Alito’s ideology if he is confirmed to the Supreme Court and replaces Justice O’Connor, who has been the crucial moderate voice and swing vote in many important cases. He will shift the delicate balance of the court rightward at the expense of individual freedom and could have a profoundly negative impact upon the everyday lives of Americans – especially young people, who could feel the consequences of an Alito Supreme Court for fifty, sixty years or more.
Our future is at stake. Don’t let Alito’s America become our America. Take action today.
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