Wider Fight Is Seen
as Alito Victory
Appears Secured
By DAVID D.
KIRKPATRICK, NYTimes on the Web, January 14, 2006
WASHINGTON, Jan. 13 --
Democrats and Republicans say Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr.'s confirmation to the
Supreme Court is all but certain, yet the fight over his nomination heated up on
Friday as both sides seized on it as a flashpoint for Senate races in the fall
and future court selections.
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Photo: Jim Young/Reuters
Senators
Arlen Specter, left, and Patrick J. Leahy closed the hearings on the
nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the Supreme Court. |
Despite growing certainty about the
ultimate conclusion after five days of hearings, interest groups on both sides
announced plans on Friday to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on
television commercials intended to influence the outcome.
And within moments of dismissing the last witnesses on Friday, Republicans and
Democrats on the Judiciary Committee traded accusations of bad faith in a
dispute over when the committee and the Senate would vote on confirmation.
Officials of liberal groups insisted that they still held hope of blocking
confirmation. Conservative organizers, on the other hand, said privately
that their advertisements were partly a victory lap to call attention to a fight
the president was winning after a spate of setbacks.
But behind the new advertisements and the partisan bickering are also political
calculations about how the vote may play out in this year's Senate races, and
about what kind of benchmark the vote count will set for the next Supreme Court
vacancy.
Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the
Judiciary Committee, declared his support for Judge Alito on Friday and said he
expected a party-line vote of the committee's 10 Republicans and 8 Democrats.
But after the committee votes, Mr. Specter predicted, the politics of the final
vote will be messier.
"They will get out that big map with red and blue, and where President Reagan
did well, and who is up for election, and what happened to Senator Daschle," Mr.
Specter said, referring to Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the former
Democratic majority leader who led fights against Republican judicial nominees
and was defeated in 2004 by a conservative Republican who made that an issue.
It will be "all that sort of high level principle," Mr. Specter said.
Members of both parties said that the number of votes that Judge Alito received
would help lay groundwork for the selection and reception of the next court
nominee. Republicans have often cited the 78 votes to confirm Chief
Justice John G. Roberts Jr. last year as evidence that President Bush's judicial
picks are in the mainstream.
"Make no mistake about it," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New
York and a member of the Judiciary Committee, "had we not put up the fight we
put up with the judicial nominations all along, you would have more conservative
people on the Supreme Court."
Officials of the liberal groups acknowledged the goal of laying groundwork, but
insisted they were still building momentum to defeat Judge Alito's confirmation.
"Rather than talking about '06, rather than talking about the next nomination,
we have got the Alito nomination before us," said Wade Henderson, executive
director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and a leader of the
anticonfirmation effort.
The coalition, which also includes organized labor and abortion rights and
environmental groups, said on Friday that it planned to broadcast advertisements
that quoted from Judge Alito's testimony. The commercials are scheduled to
run over the next week on national news programs and in Washington.
On the other side, Progress for America, a group with close ties to the
Republican Party and the White House, said it would spend almost $250,000 on a
national television advertising campaign that would call Democrats "shameful"
for their attacks on Judge Alito.
Chris Myers, executive director of the group, said liberal groups and Democratic
senators "will continue to scratch and claw up until the very, very end, so we
can't pop the Champagne corks."
Democratic senators and aides conceded privately, however, that confirmation was
almost a foregone conclusion. Only 2 of the 55 Republican senators --
Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island -- have signaled
serious concerns about the nomination. And in an interview this week,
Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the Democratic whip, acknowledged that it
would not be easy to hold together enough Democrats to stop the confirmation
with a filibuster, blocking the vote by a procedural move that requires 41
votes.
Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, one of seven Democrats who signed a bipartisan
pact foreswearing judicial filibusters except in "extraordinary circumstances,"
said this week that he did not see major reasons to oppose Judge Alito.
And in an interview on Friday, another one of the seven, Senator Kent Conrad of
North Dakota, said, "I don't think he'll have the votes that Judge Roberts had,
but I think he'll be confirmed."
Still, strategists for both parties said they hoped to use the continuing debate
over Judge Alito as a weapon in the fall, noting that midterm elections usually
depend on turning out the party faithful and that the nomination battle had made
Judge Alito the kind of polarizing figure who galvanized such voters.
Democrats and liberal groups said they were taking aim at Mr. Chafee, Ms. Snowe
and Senator Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio, all of whom are under pressure
within their party to vote for confirmation but also face re-election in
socially liberal or at least closely divided states. Republicans,
meanwhile, said they were calling attention to the liberal Democratic attacks on
Judge Alito to squeeze moderate Democratic senators like Mr. Nelson, Mr. Conrad,
Senator Bill Nelson of Florida and Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia.
All four are up for re-election in conservative states.
So far neither side of the Senate shows any signs of easing up. As he
dismissed the last round of witnesses on Friday, Mr. Specter opened a new
debate, accusing Democrats of breaching a "good-faith understanding" that the
committee would vote on Judge Alito next Tuesday so that the full Senate could
vote by the end of the week.
But Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic
leader, said the Democrats had never given up their right to a temporary delay.
Mr. Reid, Mr. Manley said, had asked Democrats to wait to cast any votes until
after the party met on Wednesday.
"The members have a right to carefully deliberate," Mr. Manley said. "It
is an important nomination."
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