The analysis of Supreme Court confirmation hearings has become
the post-Cold War equivalent of Kremlinology, the study of Soviet
behavior relying on exquisitely subtle clues to draw grand
conclusions about the future. Is that Chernenko standing next to
Brezhnev at the May Day parade? Is Andropov wearing a fedora?
So in the confirmation hearings of Judge Sam Alito, commentators
carefully parsed the phrase "unitary executive" that he used in a
single speech five years ago. They alighted when Alito described
the "one-person/one-vote" principle as "settled law" but described
Roe v. Wade as a "precedent entitled to respect." Did this
signal he would vote to overrule Roe?
Did Gorbachev wink when that SS-25 ICBM passed by? Or was it
just something in his eye?
All this speculation arises because nominees have learned that
the way to get on the Supreme Court is to say nothing and to say it
in as moderate and monotone a manner as possible.
Over more than two days of testimony before the Senate Judiciary
Committee, Alito said almost nothing. When asked about this or that
precedent, his stock response was to describe the holding of the
Court, say it was entitled to respect, and then say he could say no
more because the issue might come before him.
This convention of obscurantism in the Supreme Court nomination
process puzzles me. I don't see why a nominee can't express a
general view about a precedent or doctrine (without promising how
to vote) when it's perfectly acceptable for a sitting justice to
announce in one opinion that he supports (or opposes) a precedent
and then to decide future cases related to the same precedent.
Notwithstanding the deliberate opacity of the confirmation
process, is there anything about Alito that should give gay
Americans concern?
The national gay groups all oppose Alito, and did so even before
his confirmation hearings. But they have pretty much taken
themselves out of any serious debate about President Bush's
judicial nominees. Their position is basically this: "We have a
specific pro-gay agenda, which we understand to include the right
to abortion without restrictions. We want to advance this agenda,
to the extent possible, through the courts. We oppose any nominee
for whom there is no affirmative evidence that he fully supports
our agenda and is willing to advance it judicially."
Since no Republican judicial nominee is going to meet this test,
national gay groups might as well announce that they will oppose
any and all judicial nominees for the remainder of the Bush
presidency and be done with the matter. Their opposition will be
ineffectual, as it has been on all of Bush's nominees. But at least
we could dispense with the charade that they actually care about,
and have "analyzed," an individual nominee's record.
The best that the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund could
do to
muster a case against Alito was to point out that he is a
conservative, that he thinks there were excesses of judicial
activism in the 1960s on matters like criminal defendants' rights,
that he opposed Roe in 1985, that he has a "strong
allegiance to 'free enterprise' " (quel horreur!), that he
interprets certain employment-discrimination laws more narrowly
than Lambda would, and that he would not always remove the displays
of menorahs and creches from public land.
Where was the gay-rights issue in that litany?
I see nothing either very promising or very threatening in
Alito's record when it comes to gay issues. That's not to say he
couldn't turn out to be an imitation of Justice Antonin Scalia on
gay rights. That would be terrible: Scalia has been actively
hostile and even disparaging on the subject. But Alito could also
turn out to be surprisingly receptive to certain gay-rights claims,
as Reagan-appointee Justice Anthony Kennedy has been.
At his hearing, Alito
announced that he supports the constitutional right to privacy
that is the underpinning for the Supreme Court's decision in
Lawrence v. Texas striking down anti-gay sodomy laws. He
further suggested that he believes this right extends to unmarried
people. He was not asked to comment beyond that.
While he supports federalism and "limited government"-more
right-wing ideas Lambda finds troubling-Alito told the Senate that
he could not think of any reason why Congress could not pass a law
protecting gays from employment discrimination.
There's more. Alito appears to be very strong on free speech,
which has been critical to the gay-rights cause. As a federal
appellate judge, he supported the transfer of a gay student to
another school to escape harassment. After the hearing, even NGLTF
observed that Alito "registered immediate, palpable and sincere
horror and disgust" at the anti-gay statements attributed to an
alumni group of which he had once been a member.
Alito is not going to bring us gay marriage, but neither is
anybody else on this Court. He will probably not vote to strike
down the military's exclusion of homosexuals-also probably a strong
majority view on the current Court. He will defer to Congress and
to the states, to a very large extent, on what public policy toward
gays ought to be.
That is, reading between the lines of his testimony and making
predictions about his future conduct as compared to what his
predecessor's might have been on specifically gay issues likely to
come before the Court, Alito's appointment probably leaves us about
where we were before.