The Alito hearings have come and gone. I'll say Biden and Schumer came out like knights in shining armor. Kennedy was Kennedy, Specter was Specter, and really, the whole hearing was reminiscent of a broken record.

There is a cabal in Washington who have concocted a highly restrictive and unprincipled set of guidelines for all nominees that come before the Senate. They enforce these rules with an iron fist, and have suffocated any usefulness out of the confirmation process. I'll get into what exactly the guidelines are and why I find such fault in them, but first, I'll reprint a letter that I sent to Chuck Schumer after the second day of the hearings:

Senator Schumer,

I just watched the second day of the nomination hearings for Judge Alito. First of all, I was very impressed with the questions you posed to him and with the determination you showed in seeking his true Constitutional views.

Like you, I was disturbed by the fact that he refused to reveal his current opinion on whether the Constitution protects a woman's right to choose. Clearly, that is a matter of Constitutional philosophy and has no explicit relation to any court case, just as with the right to free speech.

There is hypocracy, or at least logical fallacy, inherent in Judge Alito's statements on this subject. He argues that the question of the existence of a Constitutional right to abortion relies so much on the specifics of the case that the it simply cannot be answered in the general sense. However, he is somehow willing to answer that same question with respect to the existence of a Constitutional right to free speech.

Certainly, I personally believe that a right to free speech exists in the Constitution, as does Judge Alito, but the right to free speech is not absolute under current Supreme Court interpretation. There are many instances in which free speech can be legally abrogated, as relating to obscenity, libel, and the "clear and present danger" test. Yet he is still able to state the existence of a general right to free speech, but not the same for abortion. Clearly, as with abortion, the specifics of the case factor into whether free speech is ultimately protected, but one can still answer in the general case that it is present in the Constitution.

Furthermore, if one is to accept that Judge Alito cannot state his views on the Constitutional right to abortion because cases of that nature may come before if confirmed, then by the same token one must also accept that he cannot state his views on any matter relating to the Constitution no matter how vague or abstract because, conceivably, any issue could come before him on the Supreme Court if confirmed.

In my view, the best way to reveal Judge Alito's true Constitutional views is to take a bottom up approach. Any attempt to grill him on specific cases will fail, but if you start discussing judicial philosophy, slowly building up his views from the ground floor until you reach a nearly inevitable conclusion, you can discern his views on practically any case with a high degree of accuracy. Senator Graham was on the right track when he started off by asking Judge Alito if he was a strict constructionist. Unfortunately, he really didn't want an answer, nor did Judge Alito supply one.

I don't know if you'll read this before the confirmation hearings are over, but I believe that if you propose to Judge Alito and the American people the flaws present in his reasoning you will either force him to reveal his true opinions on the Constitution or else expose his real motivations behind withholding answers, whatever they may be.

Sincerely,
Douglas Hanley

I think that really sums up a lot of my argument on the arbitrary nature of the rules concocted for nominees. As for my recommendations on strategy, they may have proved to be fruitless anyway. Judge Alito proved resistant to basically any reasonable line of questioning, even ones purely on Constitutional philosophy and interpretation. As Chris Matthews noted, and as is apparent from the hearings, Alito gave only definitional answers to any questions posed to him. When asked his opinion any matter of interpretation or the appropriateness of a particular test, he would never actually reveal his true opinion, he would merely state whether that was the direction that the current supreme court is taking. Matthews was also correct in saying that Bork was the last truly honest nominee to come before the Senate, and the price he paid for that was rejection.

Long story short, Alito's going to be confirmed, and he's almost certainly going to be in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade, if not other well established precedents, when on the the court.