Committee likely to back Alito

WASHINGTON — Confirmation hearings for Samuel Alito '72 ended Friday, with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) predicting the nominee would earn the support of the committee with a vote falling along party lines.

"My expectation is, regrettably, that it's going to turn out to be a party-line vote," Specter said at a press conference following the hearings. "Politics is pretty heavy in Washington these days — you can cut it with a knife."

Specter said he was also disappointed with the hearings because "some Senators asked repetitive questions again and again and again and didn't make effective use of their time."

"[The] business with the club at Princeton," Specter said, referring to Alito's membership in the controversial Concerned Alumni of Princeton, "boy, was that a puff of smoke."

Committee Democrats, meanwhile, indicated they may exercise their right to delay the vote, scheduled for tomorrow, by as much as a week.

Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat, said many of his colleagues wouldn't return in time for a vote after today's Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday.

If Alito wins a majority in the judiciary committee, his nomination will be sent to the full Senate, which will vote after three days of debate.

Earlier Friday, witness testimony in the final day of hearings seesawed between criticism of and support for the Supreme Court nominee — with little testimony falling in between.

"Nobody is casual about Judge Alito," Specter said at the testimony's conclusion, summarizing a theme of the deeply partisan hearings. "Everybody's very decisive. Emotions run deep."

But roughly a dozen empty seats behind the dais and scores more in the press area reflected waning interest in the hearings.

Most observers believe Democrats will be unable to stop Alito's confirmation, given Republican majorities in both the judiciary committee and the Senate.

The three witness panels that spoke today shed little new light on Alito's judicial philosophy, which had already been the focus of roughly 700 questions over the three days of direct questioning earlier in the week.

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Moreover, the often stark contrast in opinion from one witness to the next yielded a conflicting — and an overall murky — portrayal of Alito.

The first panel, consisting of both supporters and detractors of the nominee from the legal community, typified the ideological divide in today's testimony.

Critics on the committee focused on what Duke School of Law professor Erwin Chemerinsky called Alito's "great deference to federal authority," a characterization they all defended at length.

Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Tribe added that Alito would allow the Supreme Court to restrict abortion rights "step-by-step" until they all but disappear.

But Anthony Kronman, professor at Yale Law School and former Alito classmate, said Alito had no such agenda — or any agenda at all. "If you had asked me in law school if he was a Democrat, as I am, I could not have told you," he said.

Timid questioning from the handful of senators present followed, and the committee adjourned for Specter and others to attend a memorial service for slain New York Times reporter David Rosenbaum.

The committee later reconvened to hear an all-Democratic witness panel, whose members denounced Alito's record on civil and abortion rights. In addition, John Flym, who represented the plaintiff in the Vanguard case from which critics contend Alito should have recused himself, said it is "unmistakably clear he had an obligation to recuse."

Still fewer senators asked still more timid questions this time, ushering in the third and final panel, this one including both Democrats' and Republicans' witnesses.

Former Alito clerks Kate Pringle and Jack White spoke of their former boss in glowing terms, recalling his strict objectivity and loyalty to the law.

But civil rights advocates on the panel said the confirmation of Alito would hurt their cause.

They cited his opposition to abortion and his past restriction of voting rights and the rights of non-citizens — though all made clear that they didn't believe he was a racist or bigot.

Still, President of the National Bar Association Reginald Turner said, his "hostility to basic civil rights ... makes him particularly troubling," as does his "tendency to rule against women and people of color and for employers."