Alito critics cite inconsistencies

The AP via USA Today writes:

"A credibility gap is emerging with each new piece of information released on Judge Alito's record," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is to begin confirmation hearings on Jan. 9.

"He bears an especially heavy burden at the hearings in January to explain the growing number of discrepancies between his current statements and his past actions," said Kennedy, D-Mass.

Alito is one giant credibility gap. He is another Republican that is stretching the truth to Congress and the American people about his history and his purpose on the bench of the Supreme court. He was appointed to help overturn Roe Vs. Wade. They've been trying for decades to overturn it and this is how they are planning it. I believe that 1985 memo to be true. Slowly stack the bench to the right.

Let's look at how his credibility is falling.

• shifting explanations for Alito's participation in a 2002 case involving the mutual fund company Vanguard. Alito had pledged in 1990 to Congress that he would step aside.

• •a statement that Alito did not recall his membership in a controversial conservative Princeton alumni group until recently seeing a document.

• •a 1985 Reagan administration legal brief seeking the reversal of a landmark abortion rights case. The material was not sent to the Senate along with other records.

The article continues with a review of each item in depth.

The Vanguard case (in which he was a major investor in the company)

Ironically, Alito's critics find no fault with the legal opinion in the Vanguard case, and even his six-figure investment in the firm's mutual funds has seemed a secondary concern at times.

Not so a commitment to the Judiciary Committee during his appeals court confirmation in 1990. Alito pledged then to disqualify himself from cases involving Vanguard and three other entities.

Yet Alito was on a three-judge panel that ruled unanimously in 2002 in favor of Vanguard on a case involving the account of a deceased investor. Subsequently, the investor's widow sought a new review and Alito's disqualification, citing his substantial investments.

Alito wrote the chief judge of the 3rd Circuit that he did not believe he was required to disqualify himself, although he said he was voluntarily stepping aside. The letter did not mention the pledge he had made to the Senate, and it is not clear whether Shantee Maharaj, the woman who sought to disqualify him, knew about it.

Initially, Alito and Bush administration officials said his initial participation was the result of a computer error that had failed to flag the case.

Then, responding to a letter last month from the Judiciary Committee chairman, GOP Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Alito wrote that his pledge to the committee covered his "initial service" as a judge. As time passed, he said, he realized it had been "unduly restrictive."

But a questionnaire Alito returned to the committee last week shows that as late as 2005, he removed himself from a case involving Vanguard because it was on a "standing recusal list."

The conservative alumni group.

In 1986, as part of an application for a new job in the Reagan Administration, Alito stressed his conservative credentials. Among them, he cited his membership in the "Concerned Alumni of Princeton University, a conservative alumni group."

The group once said school officials had lowered standards to accept female and minority applicants.

In completing the committee's questionnaire, Alito stepped carefully around the issue. "A document I recently reviewed reflects that I was a member of the group in the 1980s," he wrote.

"Apart from that document, I have no recollection of being a member, of attending meetings or otherwise participating in the activities of the group."

People for the American Way announced on Nov. 18 it was seeking records at the Library of Congress that might "shed more light on the activities and ideology" of the group.

Lastly, on his memo to end Roe V. Wade.

The questionnaire also requested that Alito provide legal briefs and a detailed summary of his work on Supreme Court cases. He responded with voluminous material dating from his tenure in the Reagan Administration.

On the same day, a 1985 memo was released separately in which he outlined a legal strategy for eroding and eventually ending abortion rights.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., quickly sought an explanation "for this omission." He wrote Alito asking whether he participated in drafting the appeal in which the Reagan administration sought the reversal on abortion.

Schmidt said Alito omitted the case because he had neither argued it before the Supreme Court nor signed his name to the legal brief.

A fellow lawyer in the solicitor general's office, Albert Lauber, said he had been assigned to write part of the brief and that Alito offered to help.

Alito "helped with the legal research and analysis, and I think he gave me proposed inserts," said Lauber, whose assignment did not include drafting the plea to have abortion rights ended.

Alito "made a real contribution," Lauber said in an interview, although he added, "I wrote more than he did."

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