Alito: Don’t Hold Your Breath on Roe, One Way or the Other.

I must say, watching large chunkc of the Alito Nomination hearings has been pretty entertaining thus far, mostly because it produces articles like this one.

Let me sum it up for you.

Judge Alito does believe there’s some form of general right to privacy in the Constitution. He also believes that precedent should play a role in a judge’s decisions. But that doesn’t mean that precedent locks a judge into the precedent (and he entertainingly likened Arlen Specter’s silly “super-duper precedents” to various sizes of laundry detergent) nor that abortion is necessarily part of that general right to privacy.

In other words, Aito told the committee that he may overrule Roe and he may not. Don’t hold your breath on either.

Nevertheless, the Post chose to emphasize the statements in support of Roe and downplay the ones that didn’t. Not that the newspaper is one any particular side of the argument. No sirree.

The othre interesting thing that Alito said, and I wish he would have been more plain in saying it, is that a judge’s personal beliefs have no bearing on his decision-making from the bench. That would have ended the constant haranguing by various senators on his 1985 job pplication where he said that he believed that Roe was decided wrongly. He may still believe this and he may not but it really doesn’t matter either way. One of the hallmarks of conservative judges is that they do not inject their personal beliefs into a decision nor do they seek a certain outcome regardless of what the Constitution actually says. Unfortunately that’s not something that folks like Ted Kennedy or Joe Biden can every understand because it’s an alien concept to them.

Hopefully Alito can make that notion abundantly clear to them, and to the rest of America who can’t fathom it.

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Category: Political Pontifications