« Hope for Alito hearings | Main | Indiana bill would make abortion illegal »
January 9, 2006
The Sunday Talkshow Breakdown
LiberalOasis is blogging for choice.
LiberalOasis sized up what Republicans were saying about Alito and abortion on the Sunday talk shows, and found they can't get their story straight:
Interestingly, the GOP Senators lacked a coordinated message on [abortion]. They couldn’t decide if they should duck or be defiant.
Cornyn generally ducked, though he did offer the usual smokescreen:
I believe that Judge Alito — I don’t know exactly how he’ll handle this; this is really up to him — but I expect you’ll hear from him what you heard from Chief Justice John Roberts, and that is he respects the [Roe] decision under the principles of stare decisis.
As LiberalOasis noted when Roberts said as much in his hearings -- that he believes in stare decisis, giving great weight to Supreme Court precedents -- that’s a meaningless comment.
Because in the Bizarro Conservative World, you can use stare decisis to overturn Roe.
When Justices Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas sought to overturn Roe, they wrote in their opinion:
We believe that Roe was wrongly decided, and that it can and should be overruled consistently with our traditional approach to stare decisis in constitutional cases.
Sen. Sam Brownback, on ABC’s This Week, went a step further with the smokescreen, and tried to suggest that Alito’s views had changed since he flatly said in 1985 that “the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.”
Things do change, and positions change. He’s advocating for a position in a conservative administration at that time.
[ed. Note – No he wasn’t. Alito was applying for a job and stating his judicial philosophy.]
Now he’s going on the Supreme Court of the United States if approved by the United States Senate.
And these are different jobs altogether, and they have different parameters with them all together.
And he’s not going to answer questions about how he’s going to rule on a Roe-type case, and he shouldn’t.
Of course, Brownback had a very different attitude when Harriet Miers was nominated for the Court, telling ABC that if she “implied” Roe was “settled law” that there was “a good chance” he would vote against her.
On Fox News Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham took the defiant route:
... we're not going to sit back and watch a double standard to be imposed here.
People who have come from Democratic nominees have openly embraced the idea that they believe there's a constitutional right to abortion. They were not disqualified.
If Judge Alito advocated that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided, that's not a disqualifying event...
...the fact that he may disagree with somebody on a particular issue like abortion -- well, that happens all the time.
That happens when Clinton picked [Ruth Bader] Ginsberg and [Stephen] Breyer...
...I disagree with [Ginsburg] about everything she basically advocated. But I can understand why she was given 96 votes [in the Senate].
First off, if the Senate confirms a someone who recognizes that Constitution protects privacy rights, including abortion rights, and doesn’t confirm someone who refuses to recognize those rights, that’s not a double standard. It’s a single standard.
And it’s a standard supported by a clear majority of the country, consistently so for years.
Read the full post at LiberalOasis.
Posted by at January 9, 2006 11:14 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.blogforchoice.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2919