Alito Shouldn't Run From The Truth Of His Convictions

From The Washington Post:

Don't Run From the Truth
Why Alito Shouldn't Deny His Real Convictions

Misreading Robert H. Bork's 1987 shipwreck, the White House is bizarrely instructing its Supreme Court nominees to disown their prior attacks on wayward constitutional thinking from the high court. During his confirmation hearing for the post of chief justice, John Roberts dismissed tomes of the brilliant, caustic critiques of past constitutional capers that he authored under President Ronald Reagan, calling them merely an attorney's advice to a client.

According to his testimony, his intellectual sneers at the creative constitutional theories that summoned into being a generalized right to privacy ( Roe v. Wade in 1973) and exiled all religious acknowledgements from public life ( Wallace v. Jaffree , which banned the moment of silence in public schools in 1985) did not represent his views as an independent thinker. Roberts had joined the Reagan administration not as a Reaganite eager to alter the course of constitutional thought, he suggested, but as an opportunist who would have been equally inclined to serve under President Jimmy Carter.

Now, Samuel Alito Jr. is similarly insisting that he served in the Reagan administration as an ambitious apparatchik uncommitted to conservative principles. According to senators whose statements have been denied by neither the White House nor the nominee, Alito has distanced himself from his own writings assailing Roe and a cluster of dogmas dear to Democrats -- for example, racial preferences and welfare rights. Those writings, Alito is now saying, were crafted to curry favor with his superiors but did not reflect the authentic Alito.

What's going on here? The Bush administration argues, unpersuasively, that this intellectual disingenuousness is necessary to mollify Senate Democrats who would oppose a nominee too nakedly critical of their sacred cows, or to avert the type of sound-bite demagoguery that destroyed Bork. But in fact, disingenuousness is likely to heighten the risk of a confirmation debacle. And by running away from debate, it also blunts conservatives' paramount strategic objective of changing constitutional orthodoxies.

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My Comments:
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: when it comes to judges and judicial philosophy, conservatives need to stop running away from what we believe in, and stand and fight. We will lose this debate on the direction of the courts if we don't.