Here's hoping Alito has very bad luck on his nomination, his role on Supreme Court could be disastrous....
From Salon: "Alito's bad luckThe latest Supreme Court nominee has to face a Senate newly emboldened to challenge the imperial Bush presidency. And his paper trail gives senators plenty of ammunition to do it.
By Walter Shapiro
Jan. 09, 2006 Samuel Alito is a passionate fan of the Philadelphia Phillies, a baseball team so star-crossed that it has won the World Series exactly once (1980) in the past century. Alito was already a federal appeals court judge in 1994 when he attended his favorite team's fantasy camp, where middle-aged men suit up in Phillies' uniforms for a few days on a spring-training diamond in Florida and pretend that with the right set of breaks they could have been big-leaguers themselves. Rooting for the Phillies and indulging his inner 11-year-old at fantasy camp should have taught Alito something about the role that luck plays in sports -- and, yes, the confirmation of Supreme Court justices.
At high noon Monday (or probably a few minutes later since we are going by congressional time), Alito will stride confidently to the witness table of the Senate Judiciary Committee, smile at the 18 preening senators on a raised platform, put on his most thoughtful, nonthreatening, man-of-the-people expression for the cameras and begin the most grueling version imaginable of the law boards. But before Alito is allowed to recite his opening statement (the major event of the first day), protocol demands opening statements by those 18 senators, all of whom will make a public-television pledge drive seem like a model of brevity in comparison.
Trying to look engaged while the 18 senators read prepared remarks that reflect the law-library erudition of their staffers, Alito will have ample time to reflect on how the political clouds have darkened for presidential appointees since Chief Justice John Roberts glided through his own confirmation hearings last September. As Garrett Epps, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Oregon and an Alito critic, put it, "He has the worst luck in the world to have his nomination come up in the middle of the NSA wiretapping scandal."
Context often trumps content in politics. Even before the New York Times revealed last month that George W. Bush has acted out his belief that court orders are for wimps when it comes to eavesdropping on purported terrorists, a rebellion was already brewing over the administration's assertion of wartime powers until the last surviving member of al-Qaida gives up and goes to work for Halliburton. The libertarian wing of the Republican Party belatedly showed its moxie when three conservative true believers (John Sununu, Larry Craig and Lisa Murkowski), plus GOP maverick Chuck Hagel, joined Senate Democrats in a filibuster that has delayed a no-questions-asked extension of the Patriot Act. The Senate also expressed rare bipartisan unity in support of John McCain's notion that torture should be regarded as the ultimate un-American activity. Newsweek summarized the changed mood with its cover line last week: "A New War Over the 'Imperial Presidency.'"
Concepts like the "imperial presidency" have a special meaning for those of us who came of political age during the Johnson and Nixon administrations. Ted Kennedy harked back to the favorite political scandal of aging Democrats when he said at a get-ready-for-Alito press conference last week, "The role of executive power [will be] an area of enormous importance and consequence during the course of this hearing because I believe that we have seen historically where presidents have believed that they are above the law. We saw that with Richard Nixon in Watergate." Even Texas Republican John Cornyn -- a Judiciary Committee member who began a conference call with reporters by denouncing "hard-left opposition groups" -- conceded, "I expect that you'll hear questions from both sides on this balance between civil liberties and security."
A fair reading of Alito's paper trail suggests a strong philosophical tilt in favor of bold Bushian assertions of presidential power. This conclusion is not based on the ideological assertions in Alito's now-famous 1985 job application when he was bucking for a promotion in the Reagan Justice Department: ''In college, I developed a deep interest in constitutional law, motivated in large part by disagreement with the Warren Court decisions.''
Salon.com News Alito's bad luck