Go, go, Alito

At last, in Alito, we have what we ought to have had all along -- what we certainly didn't get in the case of Miers and didn't even really get in the case of Roberts.

We aren't being told that the candidate will be a good candidate because the President thinks so and Our Leader Must Be Trusted, or because the candidate goes to the right church every Sunday, or because he comes from Texas where loyalty counts for everything, or because he's one of the best male lawyers in New Jersey. We have fifteen years' worth of opinions where we and the Senators and everybody else in the world can go look not just at the conclusions he has drawn, but at the reasoning process by which he has arrived at those conclusions. There's no guessing here, and no blindly taking somebody else's word for it that the guy is a good lifetime appointment. We can know exactly what the nominee thinks is a judge's role in the face of the law, and we can look back and see exactly how consistently he applies his principles even when those principles lead to conclusions distasteful to his own political agenda. This is what I want to see in every Supreme Court nomination, and I couldn't agree more with Ann Althouse: because of this extensive public record of reasoning about the law, Alito is an even better nomination than Roberts.

Now, having read enough of Alito's opinions (thanks to the internet) to be reasonably comfortable that he shapes his decisions to fit the law rather than haring off after his own personal agenda, and that he seems to reason very carefully and rationally, I'm going to go vote in Hugh Hewitt's poll: confirm the guy, and if the only way is the "nuclear option" (if that's what we're really resigned to calling it), why then let's start warming up the Enola Gay's engines...man, I have to say, whichever Republican it was that decided to name that strategy after a tool of near-genocidal holocaust, ought to be required to attend his next twenty fund-raising events buck naked on grounds of sheer moronic insensitivity.

UPDATE: As was to be expected, Alexandra is all over the nomination with ruminations, links, excerpts, and in this particular case gunships at sunset.