seen this: alito the hun?
http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2005/11/alito_the_hun.htmlTHEY DON’T CALL JUDGE SAMUEL ALITO “Scalito” (meaning “Little Scalia”) for nothing. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a more reactionary judge than Bush’s new nominee for the Supreme Court. Theocratic pit bull Gary Bauer (lower right), the dwarf former presidential candidate of the Christer hard right, crowed that the appointment of Alito (upper left) was “a grand slam,” and crackpot antediluvian Phyllis Schlafly — who called Bush’s corporate flunky Harriet Miers a dangerous “feminist,” of all things —likewise gave her enthusiastic blessing to the “terribly impressive” Alito.Indeed, there’s no question that the Alito appointment was dictated by the ultraconservatives: before his name was announced in public, Karl Rove (left) went out of his way to personally call a gaggle of them — like the Southern Baptist Convention’s chief judicial enforcer, Richard Land — to boast that they’d be satisfied with Alito, the Moonie Washington Times (the Bush White House’s favorite daily) reported.
“There are a number of cases on which we know that he’s to the right of where the Supreme Court currently stands, and the way we know that is that the Supreme Court and he disagreed about a legal issue,” Pam Karlan, a professor of public-interest law at the Stanford Law School, told the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, citing abortion, the Constitution‘s equal-protection clause and the rights of those accused of crimes. And a profile in the National Law Journal of the court of appeals on which Alito sits called him “much more of an ideologue than most of his colleagues.”
That Alito would gut Roe v. Wade is clear from his 1991 decision in a case brought by Planned Parenthood, in which he argued that a Pennsylvania law requiring women to notify their spouses before having an abortion was constitutional, a big issue for battered women. The Supreme Court later struck down this legalized form of slavery, arguing that “Women do not lose their constitutionally protected liberty when they marry.”
Alito doesn’t have much use for the Bill of Rights’ guarantees of freedom from unwarranted searches and seizures. For example, he argued that police had a right to traumatizingly strip-search a 10-year-old girl (and her mother) while carrying out a search warrant that only authorized the search of a man and his home (Doe v.Groody, 2004). Did I hear someone say “Gestapo tactics” And the excellent Declan McCullagh just reported yesterday on C-Net that, In a case decided last year, “Alito ruled that the FBI did not need a warrant to outfit the hotel suite of a boxing official with a hidden audio recorder and remotely controlled video camera that could swivel 360 degrees. The devices were activated when a police informant was also present in the room of the official, who was suspected of taking bribes. Alito's fellow Judge Theodore McKee, a Clinton appointee, dissented on the grounds that advances in surveillance technology would eviscerate the privacy principles found in the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of ‘unreasonable searches.’"
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