Senator Samuel Brownback has entered into the record a letter that former Alito clear Cathy Fleming sent to the Judiciary Committee back on November. You can see a PDF copy at the New York Times here [1].
The problem with Brownback's maneuver is that Cathy Fleming is the president-elect of the National Association of Women's Lawyers and they have issued a negative rating; saying Judge Alito is unfit to protect civil rights based on his record alone.
[via NAWL issues evaluation of Judge Samuel A. Alito [2]]
Of primary concern to NAWL is Judge Alito's stance on women's reproductive rights. Judge Alito's dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 947 F.2d 682 (3d Cir. 1991), is a pointed attack on the abortion right. Judge Alito argued that married women should be compelled by law to notify their husbands of their abortions. This conclusion-that women lack medical autonomy-was at odds with the opinion of the Supreme Court in an earlier case, Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 476 U.S. 747 (1986), which affirmed Roe, condemning indirect constraints on a woman's right to choose. Judge Alito was willing to require that Planned Parenthood take on the impossible burden of proving the number of women who informed their husbands of their intent to obtain abortions. In addition, he was willing to ignore directly applicable Supreme Court precedent.
In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992), Judge Alito's endorsement of spousal notification was explicitly struck down in an opinion by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the Justice he is seeking to replace. NAWL believes that Judge Alito's reasoning in the 1991 Planned Parenthood decision stems from a bias against the abortion right and is more results-oriented than precedent supports. This is consistent with the approach advocated by Judge Alito in May 1985, when, working in the Solicitor General's office, he wrote a memo to the Solicitor General expressing the belief that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided and urged an incremental attack on it by means of decisions that would empower the states to regulate abortions and undermine the authority of medical professionals.
In his opinions, Judge Alito has disparaged substantive due process, a critical underpinning of women's reproductive rights. In a zoning case, Phillips v. Borough of Keyport, 107 F.3d 164 (3d Cir.1997), Judge Alito concurred with the majority but dissented in part, expressly to attack the validity of a substantive due process argument offered by the plaintiff. His hostility toward the Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence, upon which Roe v. Wade rests, is another basis for NAWL's concerns.
Although Judge Alito's former law clerks and professional associates interviewed by NAWL generally reported that he has had positive and supportive working relationships with women and has appropriately hired women and promoted them to senior positions, Judge Alito's interpretation of statutes affecting women and their families further reflects a narrow reading of the requirements of those statutes to the detriment of women's rights. In this area, he takes a highly technical approach to statutory interpretation that arguably is inconsistent with the intent of the statutes in question. See, e.g., D.R. v. Middle Bucks Area Vocational Technical School, 972 F.2d 1364 (3d. Cir. 1992); Sheridan v. E.I. DuPont de Nemours & Co., 100 F.3d 1061 (3d Cir. 1996)(Alito, J., sole dissenter to en banc opinion); United States v. Rybar, 103 F.3d 273 (3d Cir. 1996), cert. denied, 522 U.S. 807 (1997); Chittester v. Department of Community and Econ. Development, 226 F.3d 223 (3d Cir. 2000).
Cathy Fleming was one of the witnesses the Republicans had called to testify in favor of Alito. After the NAWL issued their negative rating (this was a day ago), she was summarily deleted from the witness list.
Hopefully some quick thinking Democratic senator in the Judiciary will pick up on this and invite her over to testify about this rating.
Hat tip to Liberal Oasis.
http://www.liberaloasis.com/archives/010806.htm#011106c [3]
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