I have not yet formed an opinion one way or another about Alito as a man or a judge. It could be that ultimately the issue for me will not be whether he is fit to sit on the supreme court; he well might be. Rather the issue for me is one of balance, and I do not favor a court in which the balance shifts in the direction of Scalia and Thomas.
It could be that the country would be well served if he replaced either Scalia or Thomas, but that's not what's before us. He will be added to the court with both those men, and that could be a very disturbing development. The question is not whether or not he is a good man and a qualified judge, but whether his taking a seat on the court will be good for the country.
Alito's fate, therefore, unlike Roberts', will have little to do with his technical qualifications. Like Roberts, he appears to have them in spades, but timing is everything. He will be caught in the crossfire of the political battle lines now forming in which Democrats, sensing the president's weakness, will mount a virulent attack on his nomination if for no other reason than to demonstrate their growing muscle. His fate will depend completely on which side has more muscle.
There has been a shift, but will be interesting to see whether this shift has progressed enough for the Dems to have enough muscle to block this nomination. So this confirmation battle will teach us quite a bit about how far the power has shifted in the last year. If they filibuster Alito's nomination, I don't think they need fear the so-called nuclear option in the way they did in the spring. The GOP is on its heels now in a way it was not then. Or is it? That's what we'll find out in this confirmation process.
I hope the GOP has been weakened, but I could be wrong. I thought it was terribly weak a year ago in the runup to the '04 election, and I still find it astonishing that the Dems could not defeat this callow, vulnerable man. But things have changed in the last year, and what was visible to those of us who have opposed Bush from the beginning is coming into view for a growing majority of Americans.
An awful lot of Americans who bought into Bush's media persona as the strong, steady leader are seeing now that he is not that, that he is a fraud. His approval ratings are abysmal and falling. He's in the bunker, and he is forced to rely on the rabid right for support. His blunder with the Miers nomination has brought this into the foreground. Blumenthal makes the point this morning in Salon:
His nomination of his White House legal counsel Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court was an acknowledgment of his sharply narrowed political space. Bush believed he could thread the needle with her because her record was unknown. While the Republican masses supported him, the Leninist right staged a revolt. In Bush's cronyism and opportunism, they saw his deviation. He was the disloyalist. With the prosecutor's indictment imminent, Bush withdrew Miers and caved. Broadly unpopular, he could not suffer a split right. His new nominee, federal Judge Samuel Alito, a reliable sectarian, is a tribute to his bunker strategy.
Will the Alito confirmation be one in which the Democrats effectively brand him as an extreme-right ideologue? If they do, will moderate Republicans in the Senate see that it will be in their best interest to break ranks with the president and senate leadership? I don't know, but if it plays out this way, it will be a sure sign that the political winds have shifted toward the Democrats.
The importance of the Alito confirmation has more to do with its being a bellwether of such a political shift, and both sides understand this. Much more is at stake here than was in the Roberts' confirmation. And I suspect the reason that Bush went with Miers before he went with someone like Alito is because it's a fight he'd rather avoid. He sees it as one he could lose, and if he loses, he's really done. This is shaping up to be a vicious, vicious dog fight.