By Marcia Davis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 6, 2006; C01
Parallel universes are real, and don’t let anyone tell you
different.
Political debate, in its own way, has always offered us
evidence of this, but it takes simultaneous and opposing news
conferences on the same floor in the same building just doors away from each
other to really drive home this alternative-reality thing.
And when the subject is the direction of this nation’s
highest court, on the eve of next week’s Supreme Court confirmation
hearings for the controversial nominee Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., well, even
Rod Serling might run into a little trouble trying to keep up.
In one room at the National Press Club yesterday was
Concerned Women for America, accompanied by a fairly long list
of female fellow travelers who had come to speak in favor of the judge. Just
down the hall and around the corner was the National Alliance for
Justice, with several law professors who, armed with a letter signed
by nearly 500 of their colleagues, had come not to praise Alito but to
bury him.
In one universe, the judge with a 15-year record on the
bench is a saint, a black-robed legal eagle, “a man of integrity,
intelligence and judicial experience” — and restraint — who will
interpret rather than reinvent the Constitution. In the other world,
he is a judicial activist from outside the legal mainstream trying
to disguise himself as a moderate. He is a man who would
endorse “strip-searching a 10-year-old” and a judge willing to give
the executive branch unchecked powers over Americans and their civil
liberties.
In one universe, that 1985 memo in which Alito expressed
his opposition to Roe v. Wade is a 20-year-old document that
tells us little about the way he would handle abortion cases.
In the other, it is a document that speaks volumes about his
judicial intentions.
In one, the American Bar Association’s highest rating for
Alito is a gold standard. In another, although it can’t be discounted,
it is more a stamp of approval on his qualifications rather than
any real commentary on his jurisprudence.
Don’t be fooled into believing that these universes are just
the manufactured worlds of political opposites. What they
reflect is a real division over just how we Americans understand the
Constitution.
As more than one constitutional scholar has noted, we have
yet to agree on just what the Constitution means. Is it a document
meant to be interpreted as the Founders originally intended? Or is it
alive, a dynamic operating system for an ever-morphing society?
The days leading up to Alito’s hearing have been filled with
the kind of political spitfire and spin that was absent from John
Roberts’s hearing last summer, when his confirmation was successfully
promoted as a fait accompli . Washington in recent days has been in full
form, with the left and the right pushing to frame the debate.
That push has arrived at a time when the Bush administration
is battling its way through low approval ratings, complaints
about its spying program, corruption scandals and that dogged war.
Alito’s hearing offers a new arena in which to fight it all
out.
Yesterday, it wasn’t just CWA or the Alliance on the march. At 11, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) hosted a briefing in which he
outlined the issues he believes the country should be concerned about
regarding Alito. At noon, about a half-dozen black
conservatives, including several ministers and Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell,
were at the Press Club, too, announcing their support for Alito. An
hour later, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) was on the Hill
telling a roomful of supporters that it was going to hurt Alito if he
tried to do the bob and weave that Chief Justice John Roberts
executed so well last summer.
Somewhere in all that,
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) was to hold
a conference call briefing on Alito. And yesterday evening
the Christian Defense Coalition and a national coalition of
clergy were to stand outside the Hart Senate Office Building “to
consecrate” Room 216 Hart, where Alito’s hearings will open Monday.
Parallel universes, of course, must have their common
denominators. Most news conferences look the same: a
row of serious-Washington faced folks standing behind a lectern waiting their turn at
the microphone. If they are lucky, the audience is filled
with journalists and not just true believers.
If they are really lucky, there might be a little spice.
CWA got lucky yesterday when protesters — members of a
group called The World Can’t Wait — interrupted the news conference.
Just minutes into the event, four protesters stood in front of the
lectern and flashed the audience. They opened their coats to reveal
gowns doused in fake blood, all the time shouting, “Women will
die!” The reference, of course, being that if Alito is confirmed, it
could eventually turn back the clock on abortion rights.
“We have heard the same tired rhetoric that women will
die,” CWA’s Jan LaRue said, holding up what she said was a flier from
David Souter’s confirmation process on which it said that women
would die.
“The American people are tired of the same
attacks.”
Down the hall, the law professors didn’t have protesters to
play off, but it didn’t stop their volley of zingers.
Questions that revolve around issues of executive power will
be critical in the process, said Professor Peter Shane of Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law.
“I’ve been able to convince people of that in recent
weeks,” he deadpanned, “especially on the phone.”
Later, in the same room where CWA held its news conference,
seven black conservatives gathered. Five members of the Coalition
of African American Pastors were joined by Roy Innis, the civil
rights activist who over the years has emerged as a staunch
conservative, and Blackwell, who moderated the session.
“We’re here to support a good man,” Blackwell said
as each praised Alito and the clergy members said they represented an
emerging black religious voice concerned about traditional moral values.
At one point, a young woman identifying herself as a member
of an opposing group challenged them on Alito’s membership in a Princeton alumni group that was unwelcoming to blacks and women.
“If we were not good enough for Alito, why is he good enough for
us?” she asked.
She noted the momentary silence, but it didn’t take long
for Blackwell and others to respond.
And so it goes when parallel universes meet.
© 2006
The Washington Post Company