Alito's attempt to shed old alliance doesn't ring trueBy DeWayne Wickham
After listening to the Senate Judiciary Committee's sparring over Samuel Alito's one-time membership in a right-wing college alumni organization, I wondered what Martin Luther King Jr. — whose life the nation honored Monday — might make of this wrangling.
Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito is poised to join a tradition of pragmatic justices who have moved the Supreme Court to the right.
How would he have reacted to the Supreme Court nominee's involvement with the Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP), an organization that tried to keep blacks, Hispanics and women out of Princeton University? King, who died at 39, didn't live long enough to see the societal changes that caused many civil rights foes to rethink their beliefs — and some to simply mask their true feelings.
In 1956, King said, "If we are to speed up the coming of the new age, we must have the moral courage to stand up and protest against injustice wherever we find it."
Alito failed that test. In 1985, when he thought his membership in CAP benefited him, he held it out like a badge of courage. Last week, when he feared his association with it would hurt him, he denounced the organization. The Senate should not be so easily fooled.
http://usatoday.com/news/opinion/columnist/wickham/2006-01-16-alito_x.htmThe USA Today article also makes the following points:
The job application in question was made after Reagan tried to win reinstatement of the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University. The tax-exempt status was lost because the university had a policy of forbidding interracial dating and marriage.
The job application in question was made after Reagan made a statement (1981) in support of the apartheid government of South Africa. resource.
"I am and always have been a conservative and an adherent to the same philosophical views that I believe are central to this administration," Alito said in the application.
Although Alito tried to backtrack on his earlier statements and positions in the hearings, it would be reasonable to ask this: If we are expected to believe that Alito was just trying to make his best impression on the Reagan White House, by saying what they wanted to hear in his job application, how can we be certain that the statements in the Senate hearing are any different.
Was Alito just telling us what want to hear?Which Alito is the real Alito - the Alito on the Reagan job application, or the very different Alito presented to us in the confirmation hearing - is a question that the hearings did not answer.
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