Procrastinet

Lithwick on Alito

filed under: Stuff to be pissed off about

For those who were, as I was, looking for some clarity on the Alito nomination, what it means, and how upset we should be about it on the spectrum of "I distrust everything the President does on principal but this dude seems borderline okay" to "oh my god man the barricades this dude is gonna wreck our country," here's Dahlia Lithwick making a disturbingly good case for the latter.

Turns out, according to Lithwick (whose writings on the Supreme Court for Slate are some of the best non-fiction prose I've ever seen anywhere), the Alito nomination has a good chance of being all about the power of the Executive branch, and making sure the Supreme Court will not do anything to limit it.

Scarier than Roe.

Here's the money:

This president—for reasons that hardly warrant repeating here—doesn't really want to be remembered as the guy responsible for the court that overturned Roe. (Although he certainly wants us to think he wants to be remembered as that guy.) No, Roe is not what keeps George W. Bush awake nights. What he wants to be remembered for is winning the war on terror. He wants to be seen as the president who carried the great torch of democracy into the world's darkest corners. And he believes—of this I am certain—that the courts are standing in his way.

Please, please read the whole thing. And then be one of those annoyingly earnest people who talk about shit like this at parties. If Lithwick is right - and boy, does this *feel* right - then it's that kind of important.

The most damning indictment of this administration - which is impossible to state without sounding like a dweeb whose underwear is too tight - is that they have absolutely no respect and no regard for the delicately tuned instrument which is American Democracy, as conceived by the Founders and developed in sporadic good faith by political leaders - liberal and conservative - ever since.

ADDENDUM: [What can I say, it's been a while since I've indulged in high political dudgeon, I seem to have a backlog built up.] Why is this such a fundamental American issue? Because one of the founding narratives of the Revolution itself was about illegal detention and incarceration without due process of those who were only trying to live out their God-given rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

No, I'm not 100% clear on what the frick habeas corpus means either, except that the government is not allowed to grab people and stick them in prison and never let them see a judge, or a lawyer, or an honest hearing, or the light of day, or their families, again. That's what the bad guys do. That's what we founded a whole god damned country to oppose.

And YES: terrorists suck and deserve the worst we can do to them and those who intend to harm our country and our people should be sent forever to the bad part of Shitville (to steal a phrase from Kevin Snipes). Anyone who tries to suggest that liberals don't believe that should stop talking. And if we could ride on magic unicorns and scoop up all the baddies and only the baddies, then we could do what we're doing and still be the good guys.

But that ain't what's happening. We're grabbing some "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" people right along with the baddies. And the Administration dearly, dearly wishes that there was no way anyone, anywhere, could ever tell us that's a problem.

If Alito is part of that effort, he needs to be kept out of the Supreme Court.

Posted by rjt at December 6, 2005 01:15 PM