Specter goes to bat for high court nominee

Support for privacy rights
Griswold is the landmark 1965 decision in which the court held that married couples had a fundamental right to privacy which included the right to use contraceptives.

Alito also assured Specter that his view of legal precedent was that “the longer a decision was in effect and the more times it had been affirmed by different courts and different justices appointed by different presidents, it had extra precedential value.”

Taking a very different line than Specter was another Northeastern Republican with a liberal-to-centrist voting record, Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee. “Judge Alito has taken many positions that appear to place him at odds with the protection of key fundamental rights,” Chafee said in a written statement Monday. Chafee stands for re-election next year in a heavily Democratic state.

Specter is a sometimes liberal-to-centrist Republican who favors upholding Roe v. Wade; some conservatives revile him for voting against conservative Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork in 1987.

Specter’s voting record has moved unmistakably rightward over the past several years – in 1998, based on his roll-call votes on key issues, the American Conservative Union gave him a rating of 38 out of 100, but last year the ACU rated him a 75.

Specter indicated to reporters that he might not have chosen Alito if he were sitting in the Oval Office. “This may shock you, but if I were president, I would handle things a little differently,” he said wryly.  “But I’m not the president and the job I have to do is make a decision on whether he’s qualified.”

If Specter follows through on his initial signs of strong support for Alito, he’d be doing Bush a large favor. Last year Bush helped Specter fend off a primary challenge from conservative Republican Pat Toomey.

Battle with conservatives
Specter’s initial signals of support for a conservative judicial nominee calls to mind the worries that those on the Right had last November after Specter won re-election to a fifth term.

GOP conservatives tried to block Specter from getting the Judiciary Committee chairmanship, which was due him by seniority rules.

“There is nothing Arlen Specter could say that we would trust,” griped Jan LaRue, chief counsel of Concerned Women for America, a conservative advocacy group, last November.

“Sen. Specter needs to satisfy not just us, but all the people who voted for the president on Nov. 2, that he is going to facilitate, and not thwart the president’s judicial nominees,” Judiciary Committee member Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, warned last November. “This is not just about me, and not just about Sen. Specter. This is about 59 million people who voted to support the president and the people who unseated Tom Daschle.”

Specter had alarmed conservatives by saying right after Bush’s re-election that “when you talk about judges who would change the right of a woman to choose, overturn Roe v. Wade, I think that is unlikely. The president is well aware of what happened, when a number of his nominees were sent up, with the filibuster.”

But Specter on Monday said he did not think a filibuster would be warranted in Alito’s case. And as in the cases of Bush's conservative appeals court nominees such as Janice Rogers Brown, whom Specter helped shepherd to Senate approval last May, the senior senator from Pennsylvania appears to be giving the Right no cause for complaint.