Democrats Have the Power To Stop Alito
Saturday, January 28, 2006
Time for Democrats to Take a StandDave Lindorff
There are times
when it is important to forget about
tactics and to simply take a
stand.
The nomination of
Sam Alito to the US Supreme Court is, for Democrats in the Senate, one
of those times.
It's not just
that Alito is conservative. The Supreme Court and the American nation
have survived conservative courts.
It's that Alito supports dictatorship.
As
a matter of simple self-preservation, Senators, Democrat and
Republican, should be opposing the appointment as judge of a man who
has argued, and still argues, that a president has the right to decide
on his own how to interpret Acts passed by Congress, and indeed whether
to even obey or enforce those acts. It
was Alito, as a lawyer in the
administration of Ronald Reagan, who conceived and promoted the idea of
"signing documents" which would effectively negate whatever
Congress
intended in passing a bill into law.
Since
then, presidents have occasionally issued such "signing documents", but
George W. Bush has written some 500 of
them, the most recent being his
"signing document" declaring that he would not honor the measure in the
military procurement bill banning torture.
If the president
has quietly opted out of 500 Congressional bills, he has in essence
told Congress that it no longer matters.
Senators
who allow this process to stand--and who vote onto the Supreme Court a
judge who defends such a presidential power grab--have betrayed their
office and the people who elected them to office. They must be removed
in the name of defending constitutional government.
It's that simple.
Democrats in
Congress have been made fools of by the Republican majority over the
past five years (longer really), entering into compromise after
compromise only to be stabbed in the back.
Now many of them
worry that if they filibuster and block the appointment of Judge Alito,
that they will somehow be blamed for being "obstructionist."
First
of all, that's ridiculous. No Democrats, and few independents, want
Alito on the bench. The only people who will be calling Democrats
obstructionist will be Republicans, who will never vote Democratic
anyway.
But in the end
none of that matters.
This
is not about Sen. John Kerry, and whether or not he is a viable 2008
presidential candidate. Blocking Alito--and the Democrats, if
they
stand together, perhaps with a few principled Republicans, have the 41
votes needed to do that--is a matter crucial to the survival of
Constitutional government.
Those
who care about preserving the Constitution, and slowing the
slide to
dictatorship, should call the Democratic National Committee
(202-863-8000) and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee
(202-224-2447). Tell
them you won't be giving a penny to either
committee unless the Senate stands firm on a filibuster and blocks this
appointment.
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