Alito veers toward the mainstream on voting rights
Washingtonpost.com reports: Sen. Herb Kohl questioned Alito at length on the 1985 job application he wrote expressing his opposition to the direction of the Warren Court, eliciting some actual news as he sought to settle some of the hottest controversies surrounding his nomination.
Alito stated that he had no objection to the "one-man, one vote" principle" enunciated by the Warren Court in Reynolds v. Simms and Baker v. Carr, and also that he had no objection to Griswold v. Connecticut, the Warren Court ruling establishing a "right to privacy" that later served as the basis for Roe v. Wade. He agreed also, said Alito, with a 1972 Supreme Court opinion barring the executive branch from conducting "domestic security" wiretaps without a proper warrant.
In this exchange, Alito also distanced himself from Judge Robert Bork, who he once praised as a worthy Supreme Court nominee but has since come to symbolize the unconfirmable candidate.
The principle of "one man, one vote" is a fundamental principle of constitutional law, Alito said. "I don't see any reason why it should be reexamined.....I never was opposed to the one-person one-vote concept."
So what was it that concerned him, asked Kohl.
He said his father, then working for the New Jersey legislature, had brought to his attention the question of "how exactly equal districts had to be." It seemed that the Supreme Court, at one point, was saying they had to be exactly equal and "that would have wiped out" some of the New Jersey re-mapping. -- Campaign for the Supreme Court - The Politics of the Nomination of Samuel A. Alito Jr.
Judge Alito's new position is quite interesting to me. Republicans in Alabama have sued to overturn the legislative redistricting on the grounds that it does not have "exactly equal districts." I am one of the attorneys for the Democratic Speaker of the House, who has intervened as a defendant.
