The Alito Stakes

[IndianaGreen]

The Alito Stakes

By Norman Markowitz

First, it is important to understand that the political center never wants to fight or knows how to fight unless the left teaches it. To say that Alito is not "mainstream," convinces no one, since the mainstream is always shifting and the failure of the center and the left to engage each other only insures that the center will engage with and appease the right and the left will criticize and denounce the center—that the "face" of the opposition center, figuratively, will be that of Bill Clinton, and the face of the left similarly will be Ralph Nader. That has been and continues to be a recipe for disaster.

Also, the left can never become mainstream unless and until it either becomes dialectically a new political center or influences a changing center to adopt in some form many of its policies, as the Communist-led left did in a limited but significant way in the 1930s.

First, the left can point to the corruption and increasing tyranny of the Bush administration, which flies in the face of traditional American definitions of freedom and democracy. The left can point not only to the repeal of Roe v. Wade, which frankly would become a high probability if Alito is appointed and virtually inevitable if Bush is then able to replace Stevens with someone like Roberts and Alito, but also to other likely destructive decisions.

While affirmative action has been undermined and its defenders forced to fight defensive battles since the Bakke decision (1978) no one should have any doubts that a far right majority would eliminate it entirely. The Miranda and Gideon decisions, placing restrictions on police conduct and providing defendants with the right to counsel, two precedents long condemned by the judicial right, would probably be reversed. The worst abuses of the "Patriot Act," the wiretaps, searches, seizures, and preventive detentions would be upheld, encouraging police agencies to carry them even further.

The "new federalism" doctrine would be carried forward in cases sustaining the power of the president over Congress, the power of the President and/or Congress over the States, the power of both the federal and state government over the individual. What the old New Dealer Bert Gross called "friendly fascism" in the Nixon years, that is a great expansion of executive power and privilege, especially police power advancing under the cloak of constitutional forms, would advance much more rapidly with Supreme Court support.

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/2660/1/148/