Washington – Sen. Ken Salazar expressed “grave concern” about Judge Samuel Alito after meeting with the Supreme Court nominee Thursday, saying he feared Alito could swing the court to the far right.
After meeting with Alito for about an hour, Salazar said he was concerned “about whether the progress that we have made on civil rights in this country is going to take a step backward if he serves on the Supreme Court.”
Alito doesn’t appear to have revised his decades-old positions on abortion, voting rights and racial quotas, Salazar added.
Salazar, D-Colo., is a member of the “Gang of 14,” a bipartisan group of senators who united to protect the Senate’s right to filibuster judicial nominees. The group decided it would allow filibusters only under “extraordinary circumstances.”
Salazar said he did not know yet whether he would vote to confirm Alito. But he also said he did not at this point foresee participating in a filibuster to block the nomination.
The senator and the judge talked about a 1985 memo Alito wrote as he tried to get promoted in the Justice Department. Salazar asked Alito about two paragraphs, one stating that he was proud to argue that “racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to abortion.”
The other paragraph dealt with Alito’s concerns that the Supreme Court under former Chief Justice Earl Warren had gone too far in extending rights to criminal defendants, on issues dealing with separation of church and state, and on voting rights.
“I’m troubled when I look at the memo and the fact that I don’t think that his views have changed at all, frankly, in the last 20 years,” Salazar said.
He also said he asked Alito about his dissenting opinion in an abortion case as an appellate judge in which Alito argued that husbands should be informed before a woman can have an abortion. The Supreme Court later struck down that provision.
“I was not satisfied with (Alito’s) response to the spousal notification issue” during questioning, Salazar said.
