The worst – the absolute worst – thing the Democrats could do is to take the advice of The Nation, reprinted by Armando at Daily Kos (presumably because he thinks it’s a good idea too).
These numbskulls want the Senate to ask Alito questions like these:
Judge Alito, what do you believe are the limits on the President’s power to interfere with the rights of the nation’s citizens in wartime? Are there executive powers that should remain unchecked by the courts?
Judge Alito, does the executive have the power to annul habeas corpus? Does the President have the right to lock people up without having to defend the action before a court of law?
Judge Alito, explain your view of the differences between the Constitutional powers of an American President and those enjoyed by an absolute monarch.
What stupidity. These questions are either so closely related to issues that almost certainly will appear before the Supreme Court in the next couple of years that he can legitimately decline to answer them, or they give him a Mack-truck-size opening to deliver a lecture on how strongly he believes in the separation of powers without actually saying anything. “The differences between the Constitutional powers of an American President and those enjoyed by an absolute monarch”?? Oh, PUH-LEEEEZ.
One hopes that the Democrats aren’t going to fall into this trap – really, nothing would make Bushco happier. Let us hope that, instead, they are going to take the much more sensible approach that I’ve seen proposed at this link and elsewhere: ask Alito how he would have voted in well-known cases that the Supreme Court has already decided. That doesn’t tip his hand for future cases – those cases by definition are never coming back – nor does it constitute any kind of commitment as to whether or not he would overrule the case, since even if you think a case was wrongly decided in the first instance, you might think it’s inappropriate to overrule it now. What it does do is force him into a fairly concrete explanation of how his judicial philosophy would play out on a particular, well-known set of facts. Concreteness is what has been sorely lacking in past confirmation hearings – at a certain level of generality, every judge is going to sound basically the same on the role of judges in a democracy and various constitutional doctrines. It’s time to put concreteness back in.
