Here come da Judge

Well we knew it was coming.  Miers was part of the setup: offered to us so that the next appointee would seem well qualified to the point that we would feel a sense of relief.  I feel a sense of dread.

Alito’s record fortunately is no secret. His record unfortunately is troubling.  This is a man whose dissenting opinion [Doe Vs. Goody 125 S.Ct. 111, 2004] upholds the police officer’s right to strip search a 10 year old girl and her mother, because they had a warrant to search her father for drugs.  It was “reasonable” says his decision, making child molestation and humiliation acceptable in the cause of ferreting out drug dealers.

He shows a pattern of imposing extremely high evidentiary burdens on plaintiffs in sex and race discrimination cases and cases of sexual harassment. He has rendered opinions denying the Government’s right to ban machine guns or to ban guns on school campuses.  You can read the long list of strange decisions here. I’m sure the NRA will be dancing with glee while women and minorities and immigrants will be groaning.

We knew it was coming and from the beginning, the fear was that Bush would pack the Court with authoritarian cranks who are troubled by too many guarantees of freedom and who see the role of government as protector of an elite and subjugator of everyone else.  What disturbs me the most is the selling of Authoritarianism as Conservatism and the depiction of Judicial excess as restraint, but I will have to get used to it. There is every chance that Bush will appoint more Supreme Court Judges. And there is every chance that the cornered animal in the Oval Office will do something akin to Hitler’s flooding of the Berlin subways to take us all down with him.