Don't "F" Alito

If anybody with an ounce of integrity still doubts Alito's judicial bona fides, perhaps a ringing endorsement from a flaming liberal will help.

As a liberal, what scares me is not the prospect of having Sam Alito on the Supreme Court; what scares me is the way my fellow liberal Democrats are behaving in response to the nomination. I’m appalled and embarrassed by the fear mongering, the personal attacks and what I see as an irresponsible and misleading distortion of his real judicial record as well as his character. Now the threat of a filibuster lurks, and Senator Kennedy’s tirade about documents being concealed seems like little more than a pretext to justify such a threat.

But what would she know?

She was only his law clerk back when Casey was being decided.

The Unitary Executive

Do you wonder what that means? That's OK. Do you not really want to know? You must be a Senator.

For the rest of us, Ronald Cass on RealClearPolitics clears things up nicely.

Of course, the theory of the “unitary executive,” as Judge Alito has explained ad nauseam, has nothing at all to say about the scope of executive power. It has nothing to say about how that power is granted or how it is checked.

Instead, the theory says that “the executive power shall be vested in the President of the United States.” Those are, in fact, the words of the first clause in Article II of the Constitution. This means that the President is in charge of the executive branch and that executive power is to be given to people who work for – and are in important ways controlled by – the President. This means that Congress can’t pass a law, even with the President’s approval, giving executive authority to people who work for Congress or for the courts.