Below The Beltway

Professor Bainbridge writes about this statement from Eleanor Smeal, President of the Feminist Majority Foundation:
The Feminist Majority opposes the nomination of Samuel Alito to replace Sandra Day O?Connor on the Supreme Court. Alito is no O?Connor. Instead of reaching out to women and/or people of color to make the Supreme Court more diverse and representative, [...]

Any chance that the Alito nomination would be peaceful is pretty much over. Today’s Washington Times reports that Alito wrote in the 1980s that he believed that there is no right to abortion in the Constitution.
Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., President Bush’s Supreme Court nominee, wrote that “the Constitution does not protect a right to [...]

I’ve written twice in the past week —- here and here — about the question of Judge Samuel Alito’s apparent shadow libertarian views on some issues, especially concerning the First Amendment. Today, UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh has an article at the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal where he characterizes Alito as “free speech libertarian.”
Money [...]

Today’s New York Times brings further evidence in support of the argument that Judge Samuel Alito harbors a libertarian streak:
Judge Alito’s broad reading of the freedom of speech and press clauses of the First Amendment stands in contrast with his narrower interpretation of other constitutional rights, including the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and [...]

Via Ann Althouse, I discovered this article by Ilya Somin at The American Spectator examining Judge Alito’s record and concluding that there is at least the hint of a libertarian streak there. The possibility that she’s correct creates an interesting dilemma for liberals:
Obviously, Alito is far from being an across-the-board libertarian. But there is much [...]

As this article in today’s Washington Post points out, if Samuel Alito is confirmed as an Associate Justice, which seems likely at this point, there will be a Catholic majority on the Supreme Court for the first time in American history.
For 150 years, from 1836 to 1986, there was usually just one Catholic — and [...]

Over at All Things Beautiful, Alexandra asks if its possible for liberals and conservatives to have a civil debate over the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. After thinking about the issue, my own opinion is that while such a civil debate is possible, it is highly unlikely given the highly charged [...]