THUS THE ARGUMENT FOR MIERS:

After 15 months on the bench, Alito shows his colors (MARK SHERMAN, 5/05/07, Associated Press)

Alito has yet to write an opinion on a major constitutional issue, not uncommon for someone so new to the court. And he has been more measured than Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, declining to join their call to overturn the court's landmark Roe v. Wade decision on abortion, for instance.

"He has been as advertised, not someone who wanted to dramatically change the law or had a fixed vision of the Constitution," said Thomas Goldstein, a lawyer who argues before the court and tracks voting trends. "But he has moved the court a significant step to the right."

Alito has voted with Chief Justice John Roberts, Scalia and Thomas in every case in which the court has been ideologically divided.

When they've been joined by Justice Anthony Kennedy, they've had a majority to uphold the first nationwide ban on an abortion procedure, to reinstate death sentences in California and Kansas and to give police more freedom to barge into homes and seize evidence.

You don't have to have gone to Yale or Harvard to know which is the right side of a constitutional issue, but you do need a certain interpersonal skill and collegiality to get four others to vote with you. No one was ever better at that than William Brennan.

MORE:
Bush Much Greater (Ben Stein, 5/4/2007, American Spectator)

A little note on life and death in modern America and why George W. Bush is a much greater man than some think he is.

Last night I watched on CNN as news filtered in of a young mother in Arizona who had given birth in a gas station bathroom sink, then drowned her baby in that same sink -- then driven off to buy a high end car stereo nearby.

The commentators were hysterical. How could she do such a thing? How can anyone be so cruel and unfeeling and vicious? That's what the commentators were asking.

But wait a minute: How different is what this woman did from what millions of American women have done by aborting their babies, especially late in term when the babies could easily have lived with available care?

She got her own hands dirty instead of demanding that someone assist in the murder?

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 5, 2007 6:32 AM