23 November 2005Derrick Z. Jackson
Pride must go before he falls. This is why Samuel Alito hopped to liberal burrows on Capitol Hill to proclaim the burial of his conservative ideology. In his 1985 application to a senior post in the Reagan administration, Alito wrote:
''I am particularly proud of my contributions in recent cases in which the government has argued in the Supreme Court that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion."
''I am and always have been a conservative and an adherent to the same philosophical views that I believe are central to this administration." He said, ''I believe very strongly in limited government" and ''the legitimacy of a government role in protecting traditional values."
''In college, I developed a deep interest in constitutional law, motivated in large part by disagreement with the Warren Court decisions."
The Warren Court of 1953-69 happened to be the one that expanded civil rights protections for millions of Americans frozen out of the Constitution until the 20th century. The revelation of the memo forced Alito to bizarrely ask liberal senators not to strictly interpret his strict interpretations.
Last week Alito visited the prochoice senator from California, Diane Feinstein. Feinstein said Alito told her, ''I'm not an advocate; I don't give heed to my personal views." The whipping boy of the right, Senator Ted Kennedy, said Alito told him that the 1985 memo is just an old job application and that the nominee said he is ''wiser" and has ''a better grasp of understanding constitutional rights and liberties."
This genuflection seemed to dampen outright outrage. Feinstein, the only woman on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said after her meeting that she thought Alito's response was ''very sincere" and ''absolutely truthful." Moderate prochoice Republican women such as Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine said after her meeting with Alito that the nominee claimed ''an enormous respect for precedent," the buzz phrase for the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision upholding abortion rights.
But Snowe also said she had not made up her mind because Alito ''didn't repudiate what he said" in 1985.
And the right wing is still cheering. ''This man is a conservative. He's been a conservative all his life," Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia said after his meeting with Alito last week. It is instructive to note that in 1998, when Chambliss was a member of the House, he voted to eliminate affirmative action in college admissions. In November of 2002, Chambliss, then the chairman of a House antiterrorism panel, said the best way to combat terrorism was to have a Georgia sheriff ''arrest every Muslim that comes across the state line."
Chambliss said he was only joking, but the crowd he spoke to laughed with him. His support of Alito makes that 1985 memo all the more serious for the nomination hearings. Alito's pride in trying to turn back the clock fit right in with the Reagan White House, which boasted even louder about it.
Reagan's 1980 campaign was marked by his states-rights speech in Philadelphia, Miss., which lauded the bigoted actor John Wayne and said nothing about the civil rights workers who had been murdered there. In office, he tried to grant tax exemptions to segregationist Bob Jones University and hired a Cabinet dedicated to getting rid of affirmative action, abortion, and the wall between church and state. He coddled apartheid in South Africa, and his idea of diversity was embodied in Interior Secretary James Watts's boast that he had a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple.
On one occasion, White House spokesman Larry Speakes said Reagan was ''proud" of his record on civil rights. Reagan himself said in 1985, ''We have a proud record on civil rights." That same year, Alito applied with pride for his promotion. In that application, Alito also claimed membership in the Concerned Alumni of Princeton, which called coeducation a ''fad" that ''ruined the mystique and the camaraderies that used to exist." It complained of ''subpar applicants being admitted primarily because they belonged to minority groups" and more students showing ''weak character."
A nominee so willing to prostrate himself to an administration that left virtually nothing to be proud of on civil rights is a solid warning that if Alito gets on the court, he will have no shame exhuming the ideology he claims has been buried.
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is [email protected].
