KENNEDY FAILS TO MAKE ALITO SCALITO!

As the Washington Post's best domestic reporter tersely understates it,
Dan Balz says:

But on this nomination, as with Roberts's, there has been a clear disconnect between the zeal of activists and the detachment of the general public.

Indeed, performances by blowhard Ted Kennedy, zany monologue-prone Joe Biden, and autistically self-absorbed Chuck Schumer can only be regarded as preaching to the converted, because these three stooges could not convince any neutral observer of anything save their own hyper-partisan extremism.

As an excellent article in the Chicago Sun-Times by John O'Sullivan points out, the Democratic inmates on the Judiciary Committee are apparently being hoist by their own petard.

Several Democrats Monday, including the reliable Sen. Edward Kennedy, seemed on the verge of making an even worse tactical error. They suggested that Alito's respect for executive branch prerogatives would make him too ready to approve wiretapping and other surveillance of terrorists. That shows a deep misreading of U.S. opinion.

Not only do most polls show that a small plurality of Americans favors wiretapping as a tool against terrorism, but even those against do not consider it a wildly extreme position. When the Democrats campaign against Alito on those grounds, they reinforce the public view of themselves as weak on national security.

Yes, but Teddy has by no means restrained his self-destructive impulses to merely diminishing our national security.

As O'Sullivan goes on to say:

Unfortunately for the Democrats, they cannot restrain their own partisanship. They know the stakes are high. If Alito is confirmed, the Democrats will finally lose their majority on the Supreme Court that for 50 years has allowed liberals to legislate from the bench on everything from racial preferences to the detention of terrorists.

Their desperation makes them imprudent. Instead of rooting their arguments in what the public believes, they base them on their own passionate political commitments. They consistently misread public opinion as a result. And they think they see in Alito their own worst nightmare: the election of a conservative judge who will legislate conservatism from the bench as their judicial nominees legislated liberalism

The Democrats on the Committee are in a bubble where they project their own judicial activism onto their Republican opponents. But is this lucid thinking? Again, O'Sullivan makes an important observation:

All conservative lawyers with realistic Supreme Court ambitions believe the role of a judge is to interpret the laws passed by the legislature rather than to make them. They all respect the written words of the Constitution and reject foreign precedents in constitutional cases. And none thinks his own policy preferences should determine his legal judgments

So are the Democrats paranoid about the new "Catholic" Supreme Court turning back the clock? Yes and No.

Some conservatives -- William Rehnquist in later years -- are prepared to let bygones be bygones. They apply strict judicial construction to future cases, but they will respect the precedents of the last 50 years even when they believe those cases to have been wrongly decided. Others -- Justice Scalia springs to mind -- are prepared to overturn at least the more egregious judicial errors of recent years when either the Constitution or statute law points plainly to a different verdict.

So is Judge Sam a "Scalito?"

In effect the first school, conservative in temperament, would entrench the established liberal gains since the Warren Court; the second school, conservative in philosophy, would overturn the judge-made successes of liberalism in the past as well as challenge those in the future. Democrats are hoping to demonstrate Alito belongs to the second and more disruptive school. They seek to defeat him on those grounds. But they -- or rather Kennedy -- scored yet another own goal Monday on this very point.

"Scoring an own goal" means shooting oneself in one's own foot, something the self-destructive Kennedy seems to specialize in!

Kennedy produced a study by Chicago's Professor Cass Sunstein that purported to show that Alito had ruled against individual rights in 84 percent of the relevant cases before him. Now, Sunstein's study was so scrupulously hedged with qualifications that it was more or less worthless in proving the senator's intended point. It did, however, contain the following judgment:

"A preliminary analysis suggests two points. First, Judge Alito's opinions are carefully reasoned, well-done, attentive to law, lawyerly, and unfailingly respectful to his colleagues. Second, it is fair to say that the law, fairly interpreted, could well be taken to support those claims. Hence he has exercised his own discretion, not lawlessly but in a way that helps to illuminate his general approach to the law."

In other words, Alito is the kind of temperamental judicial conservative who is likely to be attentive to precedent and averse even to a counter-revolution from the bench. That is the best the Democrats can hope for in today's political world.

Looks like Kennedy and his staff blundered again! But don't count on the MSM to point out that the clueless Kennedy contradicted himself by his own documentation! Their self-appointed task appears to be supporting the Democratic agenda, even if the strange crew of Democrats on the Judiciary Committee seem to get in the way of this goal!

O'Sullivan ends his article with a solid piece of good old-fashioned common sense:

Whether or nor it is the best that the rest of us can hope for is another matter. Judicial errors should not be permanently protected by precedent against correction. Wherever possible, the Supreme Court should hand back such still controversial questions to the legislatures and the voters. Where not, they should sometimes reverse their initial mis- judgment. Then, both Democrats and Republicans would learn a valuable democratic lesson: If they want to change the world, they will have to run for Congress.