ALITO the HUN

The following is a slightly expanded version of a column written for the new issue of the L.A. Weekly, and will be on the paper's website tonight and in its new print edition tomorrow:

THEY DON’T CALL JUDGE SAMUEL ALITO “Scalito” (meaning “Little Scalia”) for nothing. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a more reactionary judge than Bush’s new nominee for the Supreme Court. Theocratic pit bull Gary Bauer (lower right), the dwarf former presidential candidate of the Christer hard right, crowed that the appointment of Alito (upper left) was “a grand slam,” and crackpot antediluvian Phyllis Schlafly — who called Bush’s corporate flunky Harriet Miers a dangerous “feminist,” of all things —likewise gave her enthusiastic blessing to the “terribly impressive” Alito.Indeed, there’s no question that the Alito appointment was dictated by the ultraconservatives: before his name was announced in public, Karl Rove (left) went out of his way to personally call a gaggle of them — like the Southern Baptist Convention’s chief judicial enforcer, Richard Land — to boast that they’d be satisfied with Alito, the Moonie Washington Times (the Bush White House’s favorite daily) reported.

“There are a number of cases on which we know that he’s to the right of where the Supreme Court currently stands, and the way we know that is that the Supreme Court and he disagreed about a legal issue,” Pam Karlan, a professor of public-interest law at the Stanford Law School, told the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, citing abortion, the Constitution‘s equal-protection clause and the rights of those accused of crimes. And a profile in the National Law Journal of the court of appeals on which Alito sits called him “much more of an ideologue than most of his colleagues.”

That Alito would gut Roe v. Wade is clear from his 1991 decision in a case brought by Planned Parenthood, in which he argued that a Pennsylvania law requiring women to notify their spouses before having an abortion was constitutional, a big issue for battered women. The Supreme Court later struck down this legalized form of slavery, arguing that “Women do not lose their constitutionally protected liberty when they marry.”

Alito doesn’t have much use for the Bill of Rights’ guarantees of freedom from unwarranted searches and seizures. For example, he argued that police had a right to traumatizingly strip-search a 10-year-old girl (and her mother) while carrying out a search warrant that only authorized the search of a man and his home (Doe v.Groody, 2004). Did I hear someone say “Gestapo tactics” And the excellent Declan McCullagh just reported yesterday on C-Net that, In a case decided last year, “Alito ruled that the FBI did not need a warrant to outfit the hotel suite of a boxing official with a hidden audio recorder and remotely controlled video camera that could swivel 360 degrees. The devices were activated when a police informant was also present in the room of the official, who was suspected of taking bribes. Alito's fellow Judge Theodore McKee, a Clinton appointee, dissented on the grounds that advances in surveillance technology would eviscerate the privacy principles found in the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of ‘unreasonable searches.’"

Alito doesn’t think Congress has a lot of power, and would shrink the federal government’s ability to protect its citizens. For example, Congress doesn’t have the right to prohibit the transfer or possession of machine guns under the Constitution, Alito declared as the lone dissenter to a conviction of a violator of federal gun laws (U.S. v. Rybar, 1996). He argued that Congress didn’t have the power to pass the Family Medical Leave Act — which guarantees 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a loved one — and said that state employees therefore had no right to sue for damages to enforce their rights under the act (Chittester v. Department of Community Development, 2000). Alito’s heartless view was effectively reversed by a Supreme Court decision three years later.

In a homophobic decision aimed at striking down protection of gay kids  in public schools, Alito held that prohibiting harassment against students because of their sexual orientation or other characteristics was unconstitutional — in a case involving a disabled kid who was repeatedly a target of nasty anti-gay epithets (Saxe v. State, 2001). Although the school’s policy focused only on harassment that had the purpose or effect of interfering with a student’s educational performance, or that created an intimidating or hostile environment that prevented study, Alito’s opinion dismissed the vicious verbal gay bashing of the disabled kid as “simple acts of teasing.”

Civil rights? Fuhgeddaboutit, Alito has said in a raft of dissents to 3rd Circuit decisions — like the one in which Alito would have imposed an almost impossible burden of proof on victims of employment discrimination by “immunizing an employer from the reach of Title VII [of the Civil Rights Act] if the employer’s belief that it had selected the ‘best’ candidate was he result of conscious racial bias,” as a majority of Alito’s court colleagues lectured him in Bray v. Marriott Hotels (1997). In several other dissents, Alito wanted to make it harder for victims of discrimination based on disability and gender to prove their case. The court’s majority in Nathanson v. Medical College of Pennsylvania (1991) explained that under Alito’s restrictive standard for proving disability discrimination, “few if any Rehabilitation Act cases would survive summary judgement.”

And Bush’s new Supreme Court justice is pretty hostile to immigrants — as in his dissent from a ruling that an immigration judge should reconsider a claim from an immigrant that he’d be persecuted if returned to his home country. A majority of Alito’s colleagues in the 2003 case Dia v. Ashcroft sneered at Alito that his  dissent would effectively “gut the statutory standard” for evidence of danger to the immigrant and “ignores our precedent.”

There’s tons more like this in Alito’s judicial past — and the profile of Alito in Aspen Publishing’s Almanac of the Federal Judiciary reports that his opinions, though scholarly, are “very, very conservative . . . he plants language [in his decisions] that moves the law further to the right."

At the age of 55, Alito is young enough to stay on the Supreme Court for decades. If the Democrats don’t filibuster the nomination of this archreactionary, “Scalito” will help guarantee a Scalia-like court majority for a long, long time. But will “Holy Joe” Lieberman (right), and the other right-wing Senate Dems who engineered the sellout compromise on judicial confirmations that avoided the so-called “nuclear option,” throw in the towel, vote to short-circuit any filibuster, and cave in to the Bush-Rove Republicans on Alito? If they do, you can kiss a lot of your rights and liberties goodbye — permanently.