WASHINGTON (NNPA) – Jonathan Turley, a legal scholar and law professor at George Washington University, says that President Bush’s recent nominee to replace Sandra Day O’Connor may be even more conservative than Antonin Scalia, the conservative court’s most conservative member.
“…There will be no one to the right of Sam Alito on this court…” Turley said Monday in an interview on The Today Show. Katie Couric followed up, “Not even Antonin Scalia?”
Turley: “They’ll have to make a race for the right, but I think it’ll be by a nose, if at all.”
Gary Bauer, a leading conservative and former Republican candidate for president, said on CNN, “I think the president hit a grand slam home run here.”
There are plenty of reasons to make Bauer so effusive that he could infer that a grand slam in baseball could be hit with anything other than a bases-loaded home run.
Alito’s appointment has disappointed progressives.
“Replacing a mainstream conservative like Justice O’Connor with a far-right activist like Samuel Alito would threaten Americans’ rights and legal protections for decades,” said Ralph G. Neas, president of People for the American Way. “Justice O’Connor had a pivotal role at the center of the Court, often providing a crucial vote to protect privacy, civil rights, and so much more. All that would be at risk if she were replaced with Judge Alito, who had a record of ideological activism against privacy rights, civil rights, workers’ rights, and more.”
A 24-page “preliminary review” of Alito’s record by People for the American Way concludes: “As the following summaries of his opinions reveal, the judicial philosophy of Samuel Alito is far to the right. In fact, he has been given the nickname ‘Scalito’ by some who practice before him and liken him to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
In a statement announcing PFAW’s opposition to the Alito nomination, the organization cited an example of what it believes is Alito’s racial insensitivity.
“In one case that came before Alito, an African American had been convicted of felony murder and sentenced to death by an all-white jury from which black jurors had been impermissibly struck,” it noted. “Altio cast the deciding vote and wrote the majority opinion in a 2-1 ruling rejecting the defendant’s claims. The full Third Circuit reversed Alito’s ruling, and the majority specifically criticized him for having compared statistical evidence about the prosecution’s exclusions of blacks from juries in capital cases to an explanation of why a disproportionate number of recent U.S. presidents have been left-handed. According to the majority, “to suggest any comparability to the striking of jurors based on their race is to minimize the history of discrimination against prospective black jurors and black defendants.”