The Un-Borkable Mr. Alito

Thank God for Senator Kennedy.

He fought the good fight -- as he almost always does -- trying to oppose Samuel Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court. But I think this one is going to get through. The Republicans are not going to put up any more Robert Borks, and wannabe Supreme Court justices have had almost twenty years to understand that if they want to become one of The Supremes they have to be very circumspect about their opinions if they want to make it past the Judiciary Committee (that is, if they don't want to lie through their teeth, the way Clarence Thomas did).

Thus we get men like Samuel Alito, who has a phenomenal memory for Supreme Court cases but can't seem to remember anything at all about his membership in an organization that was designed specifically to keep women and blacks out of Princeton.

There's a fascinating piece by Jerome Karabel on HuntingtonPost.com that discusses Alito's membership in CAP (Concerned Alumni of Princeton).

After discussing the extent of CAP's bigotry in trying to keep the percentage of women and blacks admitted to Princeton down to the bare minimum, Karabel, the author of The Chosen (about the history of admissions to Yale, Princeton and Harvard), talks about why Alito would want to underline his participation in such a bigoted group to the Reagan Administration in order to get a job (and why he would want to downplay it today):

"Why, then, in late 1989 -- 13 years after CAP was founded -- would the mild-mannered Samuel Alito tout his membership in such an organization as he sought the job of Deputy Assistant Attorney General? When asked during the Senate hearings about why he had joined CAP, Alito -- whose memory of Supreme Court Cases seems quite remarkable -- said that he had difficulty recalling. When pressed, however, he claimed that "The issue that had rankled me about Princeton for some time was the issue of ROTC." But this strains credulity, for as the Daily Princeton pointed out, ROTC had returned to Princeton campus by the time CAP was founded in 1972, and the issue of ROTC did not even make a list of CAP's eight "basic principles and priorities" publicly enunciated in 1976. In all likelihood, Alito -- who was by all accounts a marginal and inactive member of CAP -- highlighted his membership in the organization for the most prosaic of reasons: he thought that it would signal to the movement conservatives who controlled appointments in the Justice Department that he shared their values and was a member of their network. Alito was not wrong, and in late 1985 -- shortly after Prospect published what turned out to be its last issue -- he received the promotion that helped place him on the path to the Supreme Court."

And this guy -- in spite of all the last-minute heroics of Senator Kennedy and the Democrats on the Judiciary Committe to block him -- is probably going to end up on the Supreme Court.

Maybe, when Alito gets onto the court, they should force him to sit between Clarence Thomas and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

That'll show him!

Tom Moran