An Alito strategy, at last

Dems on the Judiciary may actually have a strategy for undermining Alito's nomination: exposing his utter deference to Executive branch power. This is good news.

In separate appearances yesterday, three key Democrats on the Judiciary Committee said they plan to link Alito's past writings about executive power to an escalating dispute over Bush's expansive view of his constitutional power as commander in chief.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, said Alito had argued for greater presidential powers as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration and had pushed for one of the legal mechanisms used by President Bush last week to assert the power to bypass congress-ionally approved legal limits on torture.

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said he plans to quiz Alito about a speech the nominee delivered to the conservative Federalist Society in 2000. In his speech, Alito endorsed a legal theory that calls for stronger presidential control of government operations and a reduced role for Congress.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, cited a 1984 memo Alito wrote saying that an attorney general should be immune from a lawsuit over illegal wiretapping. Alito's support for circumventing wiretap laws is significant in light of the disclosure that Bush has authorized wiretapping of Americans' international calls in spite of a 1978 law that required warrants for such surveillance, Kennedy said.

''Is there any limit to executive power and authority that this nominee will recognize?" Kennedy said. ''The executive power issue is front and center now. The American people are very sensitive to where this is all going and whether there is going to be accountability. They want to do what's right in terms of their security, but they want" oversight.

But defenders of Alito yesterday rejected any connection between the nominee's past writings and the current disputes over Bush's powers. They predicted that a strategy of focusing on executive power issues would fail to convince a majority of senators or the public that Alito should be rejected.

Maybe it will fail, but that doesn't mean it's not important to mount a powerful attack on a guy who was chosen by the Cheney administration, not because of his position on Roe v Wade (that was just a slice of sirloin for the radical clerics), or his approval for strip-searching minors, but because, along with Roberts, he helps Bush pack the court with judges willing to give the Executive branch much wider latitude than it has historically been given, while hemming in the powers of the Legislative branch.

Again, maybe this approach will fail to convince enough citizens and senators that Alito poses a real threat to individual freedom. But it has the benefit of being important and is something -- privacy, all-powerful government -- that Americans of lots of stripes will pay attention to.