Conservatives are warming up to Sam Alito, the president's new Supreme Court nominee.
By BILL ADAIR and ANITA KUMAR
Published October 31, 2005
WASHINGTON - Samuel Alito Jr., President Bush's latest nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, has been known as "Scalito" because he reminds people of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, but he is quieter and less predictable than the sharp-tongued justice.
Alito, a 55-year-old federal judge in New Jersey, is a graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law School who was so ambitious that his undergraduate yearbook said he planned to "warm a seat on the Supreme Court." Yet he is so low-key Princeton professor Robert George said "You wouldn't know he's in the room."
Alito is an avid baseball fan and a coffee lover. A Newark shop named one of its coffees after him. Despite his quiet nature, a friend says if you hand him a microphone, "he becomes Henny Youngman."
Monday morning, Bush nominated him to replace Harriet Miers, a White House aide who abruptly withdrew last week after strong opposition from conservative Republicans. By Monday afternoon, many of those critics had endorsed Alito.
He has been portrayed as a sharp foe of abortion because of his opinion in a famous Pennsylvania case. But in other cases, he has struck down a law prohibiting late-term abortions and, in another, voted in favor of abortion rights.
His friends - including Democratic ones - say his rulings are based on the law rather than his personal views.
"I'm a Democrat who doesn't believe the Bush administration has done anything right in five years. But I think it's a great nomination," said Walter Timpone, a Morristown, N.J. attorney who worked with Alito when he was a federal prosecutor. "I don't think you've got an ideologue on your hands. You've got a very fair-minded judge."
Walter F. Murphy, Alito's thesis adviser at Princeton who has stayed in touch with him, is a sharp critic of the Bush administration who nonetheless is happy with the choice.
He confessed "surprise" that Bush chose "a person as intellectually gifted, independent and morally principled as Sam Alito..."
Alito is married to Martha-Ann Bomgardner, an attorney, and has two children, a college-age son, Philip, and a daughter, Laura, who is in high school.
Alito's father Samuel came to the United States from Italy in 1914 and worked as a staffer in the New Jersey legislature, serving both Republicans and Democrats. Alito's mother was a public school teacher.
Alito majored in government and foreign affairs at Princeton University and wrote his thesis, La corte costituzionale italiana, after researching it on the sidewalk cafes of Rome and Bologna in the summer of 1971, according to the Princeton yearbook. He served as president of the Debate Panel during his junior year and later coached a high school debate team.
He served as a law clerk and assistant U.S. Attorney in Newark and then came to Washington at the start of the Reagan administration, first as assistant to the solicitor general, in which he argued 12 cases before the Supreme Court, then as deputy assistant attorney general.
He went back home to New Jersey in 1987 to be U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, where his first assistant was Michael Chertoff, now the Homeland Security secretary.
Timpone, who also worked for Alito, said his boss was always willing to let the underlings get the glory, which is unusual for U.S. attorneys, a publicity-hungry breed.
In 1990, the first President Bush nominated Alito to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, a liberal-leaning court, and he has been there ever since. Colleagues say he is known for his careful, comprehensive legal analysis that is devoid of personal or political considerations.
Although President Bush said Harriet Miers was the nation's "most qualified" candidate before she withdrew her nomination, Alito has far more experience. Miers had not been a judge, but Alito has been one for 15 years. Bush said he "has more prior judicial experience than any Supreme Court nominee in more than 70 years."
Bush was counting up years on the bench, reaching back to Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, who had 18 years, when he joined the Supreme Court in 1932. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Alito "is someone who has a conservative judicial philosophy."
Yet he has voted both ways on abortion rights cases.
His most famous decision was in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey in 1991, which challenged Pennsylvania abortion law that required a 24-hour waiting period, parental consent for minors and that women inform their husbands of their decision to seek an abortion.
The three-judge panel upheld the laws but struck down the requirement that women notify their husbands. Alito joined the panel in supporting the laws but also said he backed the requirement that husbands be notified.
Alito's 90-year-old mother, Rose, was more direct about her son's feelings the controversial topic. "Of course he's against abortion," she said.
But his vote in a 1995 case shows he does not always take the anti-abortion side.
That case, Elizabeth Blackwell Health Center vs. Knoll, involved technical matters about a federal abortion law. Alito's decision not to join a dissenting judge's anti-abortion opinion shows his rulings do not fit neatly onto one side or the other, said legal historian David Garrow.
Alito "is not a policy-driven true-believer who's used every possible opportunity to advance one side's preferred outcome, but instead is a judge who has indeed come down on both sides," Garrow said.
In 1999, Alito voted in favor of a holiday display Jersey City. The court held that the display didn't violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment because, in addition to a Nativity scene and a menorah, it also had a Frosty the Snowman and a banner hailing diversity.
In 2004, he voted with other judges to strike down a Pennsylvania law prohibiting student newspapers from running ads for alcohol. Alito said the law violated the First Amendment rights of the student newspaper, The Pitt News, from the University of Pittsburgh.
"If government were free to suppress disfavored speech by preventing potential speakers from being paid," he wrote, "there would not be much left of the First Amendment."
Times researcher Cathy Wos contributed to this report, which included information from the Associated Press.[Last modified October 31, 2005, 18:54:49]
