Senate Civility
January 12, 2006
Wall Street Journal Page A12
It's a sign of how little Democrats have on Supreme
Court nominee Samuel Alito that on Day Three of his confirmation
hearings they were still pounding away on his membership in an obscure
Princeton alumni group that flowered briefly at the judge's alma mater.
They can't touch him on credentials or his mastery of jurisprudence, so
they're trying to get him on guilt by ancient association.
Senators Ted Kennedy and Chuck Schumer did their best
yesterday to imply that Judge Alito was racist and sexist by linking
the nominee with the views of some members of Concerned Alumni of
Princeton, which back in the 1970s and 1980s took issue with university
policies on coeducation and affirmative action. The questioning was
mean enough that Judge Alito's wife left the hearing room after GOP
Senator Lindsey Graham apologized for the comments of his fellow
Senators. "Are you really a closet bigot?" Mr. Graham asked the
nominee. "No, sir, you're not."
Judge Alito doesn't recall being a member of CAP, but
says that if he was it must have been because he shared CAP's concern
about keeping ROTC on campus. For the sin of not recalling, he was then
tarred as dishonest. Senator Kennedy demanded to know whether Judge
Alito had read various articles on CAP that had appeared more than two
decades ago, including an editorial that ran in these columns on
January 17, 1985.
Much as we like our own work, even we confess to
having forgotten about that editorial. We'd like to think Senator
Kennedy reads us so assiduously that he knew just where to look, but
something tells us his staff dug it up from our computer archives. But
we appreciate the unlikely plug. Our readers can find the editorial on OpinionJournal.com1.
As for Judge Alito's prospects, if this irrelevant arcana is the most
his opponents have, he can start measuring his new judicial robes.
