He might have heard of it; it was a pretty big case

January 10, 2006

Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) may have asked one of the more politically interesting questions of today’s Samuel Alito hearing: Was the Supreme Court correct to take the Bush v. Gore case in 2000?

“I really don’t know,” Alito said. “I really have not studied that case the way I studied a case as a judge.”

Kohl followed up, noting that just six years ago, this was a “huge” case, debated throughout the legal community. Surely, Kohl said, in light of Alito’s position, he gave “a lot of thought” to the case.

“I have not studied that case as I would as a judge,” said Alito, “in the way I decide legal issues as a judge.”

As Tim Grieve noted, it wasn’t quite Clarence Thomas pretending to have never thought about Roe v Wade while he was in law school in 1973, “but it came awfully close.”

I find that impossible to believe. One of the biggest or at least high profile cases recently, and he never studied it. Please.

  • If this clown has this much of an opinion, and these hearings are supposed to be about his quailifcations he sounds like he doesn’t know crap about being a judge.

  • I think what he means by that is that when he heard they took the case, he cheered. Seeing as he is a Bush supporter. But he’s trying to make the point that if he were in the position of having to decide whether taking the case was, itself, constitutional, he would have to study the law and make a judgment based on the law, not simply react to the case as a partisan. It’s a good answer, even if I doubt seriously that he would have rejected the case, given that the other judges were willing to take it.

  • These are great questions. If they are reported, with the answers, maybe, just maybe, the dense american public will see that the man is a liar and pretty easy to see through.

  • Every Joe Schmo across the country had an opinion about that case. How can this guy claim to have not thought about it as a judge?

  • Catherine,

    I still think it’s ridiculous that someone who is so proud of his Constitutional scholarship would claim that he hasn’t thought about the case from the point-of-view of Constitutionality (i.e. “rightly-decided”). Alito is a law nerd, and he would have had the entire case dissected as quickly as hackers take apart the latest Microsoft security patch. He has an opinion. Of course, he is as ashamed of that opinion as he is about all of his others –the public must not know the truth!

  • The beautiful thing about asking a nominee about Bush v. Gore is that they can’t claim to not have an opinion on the case because “the issue might come before me on the Court.” As everyone knows (including Alito, I’m sure), the Supreme Court said that crazy thing in their opinion about how the decision doesn’t set any sort of legal precedent, etc. (I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know what the correct term but you know what I’m talking about.)

    So how about if Sen. Kohl gives Alito a copy of the decision as a homework assignment? “Come back tomorrow with a thousand word essay on Bush v. Gore.”

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