Wider Fight Is Seen as Alito Victory Appears Secured

[kurth]

New York Times
January 14, 2006
Wider Fight Is Seen as Alito Victory Appears Secured
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

WASHINGTON - Democrats and Republicans say Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr.'s confirmation to the Supreme Court is all but certain, yet the fight over his nomination widened on Friday as both sides seized on it as a flashpoint for Senate races in the fall and future court selections. Despite the growing certainty about the ultimate conclusion after five days of hearings, interest groups on both sides announced new plans on Friday to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on television commercials intended to influence the outcome. And within moments of dismissing the last witnesses on Friday, Republicans and Democrats on the Judiciary Committee traded accusations of bad faith in a dispute over when the committee and the Senate would vote on confirmation.

Officials of liberal groups insisted that they still held hope of blocking confirmation. Conservative organizers, on the other hand, said privately that their advertisements were partly a victory lap to call attention to a fight the president was winning after a spate of setbacks. But behind the new advertisements and the partisan bickering are also political calculations about how the vote may play out in this year's Senate races, and about what kind of benchmark the vote count will set for the next Supreme Court vacancy.

Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, declared his support for Judge Alito on Friday and said he expected a party-line vote of the committee's 10 Republicans and 8 Democrats. But after the committee votes, Mr. Specter predicted, the politics of the final vote will be messier. "They will get out that big map with red and blue, and where President Reagan did well, and who is up for election, and what happened to Senator Daschle," Mr. Specter said, referring to Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the former Democratic majority leader who led fights against Republican judicial nominees and was defeated in 2004 by a conservative Republican who made that an issue. It will be "all that sort of high level principle," Mr. Specter said...

Strategists for both parties said they hoped to use the continuing debate over Judge Alito as a weapon in the fall, noting that midterm elections usually depend on turning out the party faithful and that the nomination battle had made Judge Alito the kind of polarizing figure who galvanized such voters. Democrats and liberal groups said they were taking aim at Mr. Chafee, Ms. Snowe and Senator Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio, all of whom are under pressure within their party to vote for confirmation but also face re-election in socially liberal or at least closely divided states. Republicans, meanwhile, said they were calling attention to the liberal Democratic attacks on Judge Alito to squeeze moderate Democratic senators like Mr. Nelson, Mr. Conrad, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida and Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia. All four are up for re-election in conservative states...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/14/politics/politicsspecial1/14confirm.html

[autorank]

1. If they don't filibuster now, when well they. When Charles Manson is nomi

...nated, or maybe Jeffrey Dahmer from the grave.

This is just dreadful. They have multiple options. The longer it takes in the Senate, the great chance there is that something will come out like staged crying, etc.

Of interest, the Democrats said they'd like things delayed a week. Maybe they have something "developing."

Let's hope it develops real quick!

[sandnsea]

2. The mine, Schiavo, retarded boy

I hope they switch the debate to things that are pertinent to the election and matter to the people. If we can't rally some interest in blocking a right wing supreme court, then we're in big trouble for November.

[On the Road]

3. They Needed to Go in Saying:

"Unless you convince me, no way." That's what happened with Bork.

All these stupid questions about recusal and so forth were beside the point. The Democrats had a right to block the nomination on philosophy alone. And they acted like they had to come up with some bogus excuse.

[EST]

4. Sen Spectre insulted the dems

and showed his disdain for the "dignity" of the confirmation process by demonstrating again and again, throughout, that the friggin' clock and his demand for subservience to it more important than any sort of deliberative commitment or careful consideration. He may be too conscious of his own mortal clock or maybe his diminishing faculties are losing out to his weasel nature.
That yoyo style is inordinately hard on anybody who must depend on him for their own direction.

[fujiyama]

6. Yeah I really hate when people talk about how "moderate"

he is, or Snowe, or Collins are either for that matter.

They are fascist bootlickers just like the rest of them. Fuck them. And fuck the stupid Dems that vote for these bastards...

And for that matter, what the fuck is wrong with the party for not challenging these senators from moderate states more seriously?

:rant:

[joeybee12]

5. Memo to Dems: If you don't fillibuster, hang it up for 2006...

...if you can't get your shit together and at least TRY to block this right wing freeper who is morally and ethically unfit to serve on the SCOTUS, why do you think anyone is going to rally behind youon any issue?

[Pryderi]

7. Pelican Brief: 2009.

[snowbear]

8. Pelican Brief 2009 ??

Wazzat?

[Pryderi]

9. um...it was a book written by Grisham.

[Dr Fate]

10. I'm tired of being a chump. n/t

n/t