The Senate Sanitarium

The Senate Judiciary Committe voted today along party lines (10 yeas, 8 nays) to send Samuel Alito's nomination to be Associate Justice to the floor. This called for a C-SPAN fix!

Sen. Leahy (D-VT) did a pretty good job of stating his case: his tone was that Alito defers too much to the executive branch of gov't....Alito earned his stripes fighting for the Reagan administration, and while you can take a boy out of the country.....
Leahy's statement appears on his website here.

Sen. Hatch (R-UT) did a pretty good job of explaining his vote, too, by repeating that Alito is well-qualified and has logical reasons for his rulings. Hatch referred to Ginsburg and Breyer as justices who were too dang liberal for his taste, but got his vote.

Sen. Biden, however, went over the edge (not the first time in these hearings), complaining about how Alito refuses to punish police officers for searching a 10 year-old girl... I haven't gone back to check the transcripts, but I remember Alito's answers relating to that case being something like this: if I stopped the police from searching kids in a crime scene, then I'd be sending a message to criminals that exploiting kids as messengers or drug-runners is okay, and that would be worse for kids. Posner would be proud; Alito here looks at the consequences of his decisions, and I've got to respect that.

I didn't get to hear all of the senators' statements, but I get the feeling that these votes weren't cast with the American public (or the future of confirmation hearings) in mind (oh, how naive you must be, G. Spinach!).

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Josh Marshall, who writes the Talking Points Memo, had this post up today arguing against a Hillary Clinton run for President in 2008. I agree wholeheartedly. FLOTUS #42 has too much history as an insider (Whitewater hasn't faded from memory yet), and as much as I'd like to see a woman president, I'd vote Liddy Dole over Hillary most days of the week.

My eyes are on Bill Richardson. He's got the foreign policy background and the populist stance to make a go of it. We shall see; we shall see.