What Makes Sammy Run?

It's becoming clearer why Sam Alito was Bush's next choice after career Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court. If he couldn't get hisself a career toady like Miers, then surely a hack like Alito, with slavish inclinations toward an imperial executive branch, certainly would suffice. Indeed, Alito may have been the first choice all along, and Miers was just a cynical head-fake to whip up the usual ivory-tower mouth-breathers.

As a young Justice Department lawyer, Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. tried to help tip the balance of power between Congress and the White House a little more in favor of the executive branch.

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration, like other White Houses before and after, chafed at the reality that Congress's reach on the meaning of laws extends beyond the words of statutes passed on Capitol Hill. Judges may turn to the trail of statements lawmakers left behind in the Congressional Record when trying to glean the intent behind a law. The White House left no comparable record.

In a Feb. 5, 1986, draft memo, Alito, then deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, outlined a strategy for changing that. It laid out a case for having the president routinely issue statements about the meaning of statutes when he signs them into law.

No doubt Alito will try to characterize the draft memo, much like his earlier disclosed briefs on Roe and Griswold, as some sort of go-along-to-get-along bullshit. Fine. I say give him the benefit of the doubt on that, and then ask aloud why exactly such a brazen hack deserves to be appointed to the Supreme Court? Do we need twenty-plus years of Strip Search Sammy's kiss-up-kick-down jurisprudence?

Bush may be acting without fanfare for a reason. As Alito noted in his memo, the statements "will not be warmly welcomed" on Capitol Hill.

"The novelty of the procedure and the potential increase of presidential power are two factors that may account for this anticipated reaction," he wrote. "In addition, and perhaps most important, Congress is likely to resent the fact that the president will get in the last word on questions of interpretation."

Yeah well, I thought it was SCOTUS that was supposed to be the final word on interpretation and implementation. But it's pretty clear where Alito is coming from here. He just wants to be a reliable rubber stamp, a tool for his masters. He might as well have a handle coming out of his back. If he ran for the Senate, he'd be the next Mitch McConnell, a cipher whose next pronunciamento is already known even before he's thought to write it down, much less tell anyone else.