Alito’s first significant vote: splits with conservatives
on Feb 1, 2006 at 9:58 pm
Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., one day after joining the Court, cast his first significant vote on Wednesday evening, and in the process split with the Court’s other conservatives: Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
Those other three wanted to nullify an Eighth Circuit Court order delaying the execution of a Missouri death row inmate. The state’s request to lift that stay order went initially to Alito, who is assigned to handle such emergency matters from the Eighth Circuit. He passed the matter on to his eight colleagues, resulting in the vote to leave the lower court stay in place.
The order made no mention of Alito not participating — such a notation would have been added had he opted not to vote on the matter (Crawford v. Taylor, application 05-A-705). Earlier in the day, he did participate in at least one of the other orders in the Missouri case, casting a vote — along with all of his colleagues — on that particular maneuver. The apparent unanimity that time seemed to suggest the matter had little real significance.
There was no explanation for the final order leaving the stay in place — the latest in a flurry of last-minute pleas from the inmate, Michael Taylor, and from the state of Missouri. Taylor had been scheduled to be executed at midnight. Like other death row inmates who have been filing eleventh-hour pleas to the Court over the past week, Taylor is seeking to challenge Missouri’s use of lethal injection as its execution method. There has been no consistency in the results these pleas have drawn from the Court.
Alito and his colleagues acted on the latest round in the case after Alito and several colleagues had participated in another oath-taking ceremony for the new Justice — this time, in the White House’s ornate East Room shortly after 4 p.m.
It was entirely a political event — another way for President Bush and his aides to showcase Justice Alito and the triumph he appears to represent for the President in moving to change the Court’s direction. Alito already was a full-fledged member of the Court, after he took the required two oaths at midday on Tuesday at the Court. The White House festivities also were no substitute for Alito’s formal investiture ceremony, which will occur later at the Court.
Alito went back to his judicial duties after delivering a quite lengthy and at times emotional response to the President, filled with his expressions of gratitude for being named to the Court.
It appears that Alito will now cease to be the equivalent of a political prop for the White House. His only function now, it seems, is to be a judge
RESPONSE TO COMMENTS: The blog, as always, appreciates the efforts that our readers take to comment upon the posts. As a general rule, the comments will be allowed to go unanswered, in the way that letters-to-the-editor of a newspaper so often do. Now and then, though, the comments are critical enough that it would be disdainful not to respond. In this case, the comments suggesting hostility to Justice Alito deserve a response from the author.
When one has spent a professional lifetime covering the courts, and, in particular, the Supreme Court of the United States, one comes to understand deeply the vast difference between the way politicians react to the Court and the way other judges, lawyers, and sound legal journalists do. The Justices should not be put on display as if they were department store mannequins, placed in the window for mere show. The present White House’s behavior throughout the week of the Senate votes — on cloture, and then on confirmation — has shown a disturbing tendency to treat Judge Alito as if he were little more than political adornment. It scheduled the White House ceremony before the Court was even able to make final its own plan for the Judge to take his oaths and join the Court, and, in a display of particular institutional adolescence, sought to reveal even the Court’s oath arrangements before the Court itself could do so. The White House press office informed the gaggle of White House reporters of the plans without ever informing the Court, in fact. And, by proclaiming even before the final Senate vote that Alito would be attending the State of the Union message, the White House locked him into that, even if he may have had some reservations about being used in that way — reservations that some other Justices have had in recent years.
The author of this post has made a career of showing a decent respect for every Justice who has served in the last half-century. Justice Alito will get the same.
One would not dare to offer advice to the White House on how it wants to stage political theater, even over the nomination of a Supreme Court Justice. But one might hope that it would be done with some delicacy, with some sign of an awareness that the Court is not an extension of the Executive Branch, and with some gesture of respect for the independence of the Judiciary. It is not too much to suggest that Justice Alito, after what he has been through, probably would share those sentiments.
