Another article out there saying that Alito is not one of those right-wing crazy types. Watch out, Thomas! Can all this be true? This article along with the Washington Post one paints Alito as extremely intellegent, conservative by nature, not ideology. In other words, kind of like John Roberts. I think this is the best we can hope for from Bushie. From the
article:
It remains to be seen what kind of justice Judge Alito might turn out to be, if he gets the chance: whether, for instance, he is the upper-case conservative that the right may hope for and many on the left fear. An examination of several chapters in his life suggests he is conservative by temperament, upbringing and experience - conditions that appear to have shaped his approach to life and his work more than any narrow ideological niche.
J. L. Pottenger Jr., a friend of Judge Alito's at Princeton and Yale who is now a professor at Yale, said: "The reason I'm hoping he gets confirmed, even though I am a liberal, maybe an ultraliberal, is because I think he's an honest, well-intentioned guy who believes in judicial restraint in the model of Supreme Court Justice John Harlan and I can't really argue with that as a judicial philosophy. I don't think he's an ideologue. I don't think he's going to be out there trying to roll back the clock."
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Professor Manning said: "In the Justice Department, there was definitely a sense of a real kind of enthusiasm or headiness, however you want to characterize it. He was a very dispassionate lawyer. He struggled over issues. He didn't think of things as slam dunks or easy. He wrestled with things."
(farcast here, can you imagine a president like this?)
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Judge Alito was something of a stickler about how opinions and other documents were researched and prepared. And colleagues in Washington remember him as a person with impressive powers of concentration who would head off to the law library and not return for hours.
"Somewhere in his past, this guy learned to do research like nobody I know," said Carter G. Phillips, a Washington lawyer who first met Judge Alito in 1981. "Obviously, if you're a lawyer and you have real powers of concentration and an ability to do research, then those are enormous gifts to have for the practice of law."
It's a really long and insightful article and I've barely scratched the surface. Check out the whole thing.