In a Close Vote, Senate Confirms Supreme Court Nominee Alito
Feature Story by civilrights.org staff - 1/31/2006
Samuel Alito, President Bush's nominee to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court, was confirmed Tuesday, 58-42.
Although the controversial nominee received more "no" votes than any other confirmed Supreme Court nominee in the last 100 years, other than Justice Clarence Thomas, it was not enough to keep what opponents called a serious threat to fundamental rights and freedoms off the nation's highest court.
"The American people deserve much better. Today our elected leaders abandoned their obligation to protect those most reliant on an independent judiciary," said Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR).
Court watchers say because Alito had been named to replace swing vote O'Connor, the stakes were particularly high.
Acknowledging the shift in the Court this confirmation represented, Alliance for Justice President Nan Aron said in a statement, "The Supreme Court makes decisions that touch the lives of all Americans. Unfortunately, the balance of the Court has now tilted dramatically to the right, placing our fundamental rights and freedoms in jeopardy."
Though urged to name a consensus candidate after the nomination of his first choice, Harriet Miers, was derailed by the right wing, the president instead nominated Alito. Civil rights groups said that Alito was a choice resulting from right wing pressure, not from what the nation wanted or needed.
Indeed, the Alito nomination battle proved to be extremely divisive. Calling him a nominee who would turn back the clock on decades of civil rights progress, a number of civil rights and women's rights groups, including LCCR, had opposed Alito.
"From the beginning of his career, through his decision making as a jurist on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Judge Alito has routinely favored a reading of statutory and constitutional law that curtails the rights of individuals, limits remedies available to them, and undermines the power of Congress to protect those individuals," LCCR wrote in a January 5 memo on the nominee's civil rights record.
"President Bush could have used this nomination to unite the country behind a mainstream nominee. Instead, he put his allegiance to the far right ahead of the interests of the nation, and forced this bitter and divisive battle. It is especially painful that the President's efforts to undermine civil rights and women's rights advances on the very day we lost Coretta Scott King, a civil rights pioneer who spent her life fighting for fairness and freedom," said Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families, in a statement.
"This is a bitter day that the civil rights community will long remember," LCCR's Henderson said. "We have no doubt that Alito's confirmation will take a heavy toll on our nation's hard-won civil rights gains."
