1 Live Blogging Of The Alito Hearings

[Real time posting here, "The Hearings Begin." Click through!.]

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We’re going to give it a try anyway, improvising as we go. We plan to do it for the full set of hearings.

We invite anyone who is interested to participate, either in our regular comments, or by adding quick comments using the shout box to the right. If you’re already registered, just sign in and you’ll see the box within the box which allows you to add a "shout," or answer a shout; if not registered, please do so, and join the discussion.

We’ll start a new post when the hearings begin, which we’ll update through-out the first session today, then come back and start a new post to keep track of the second afternoon session.

On the other side of the break, our first entry in this discussion.
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Is Alito All But Forgotten? Along With What Really Happened to Mr. Bork?

It occurs to me as we approach the beginning, today, yes, today, of Sam Alito’s confirmation hearings that we may have become distracted by the thorough-going nature of this Presidency’s grab for illegitimate power, it’s corrupt and unconstitutional ways, the splendid array of targets it presents to us on what seems like an hourly basis, and thereby failed to notice the next big fight is upon us.

If Alito gets confirmed, the rescue of our democracy from the crazed crowd currently occupying the White House and running Capitol hill gets a whole lot harder.

I can practically hear the muttering response: Yeah? So what are we supposed to do about it, with nothing at our disposal but a useless Democratic Party…mutter, mutter…spineless…mutter, mutter…no guts…bunch of poll-driven centrists…a corporate party just like the Republicans…

A personal admission here; I had intended to put up this post last week in an attempt to rally the left blogisphere, and its huge readership, evidenced in those 100 plus comment threads we see commonly these days, into a loosely organized grassroots efforts to give support to Democrats in the coming hearings. I didn’t because of a bout of discouragement of my own. Not about Democrats in the Senate, about an embrace of helplessness of which, in my view, the constant attacks on Democrats by voters sufficiently engaged to leave comments on a blog who should be the Democratic base are a harbinger.

I don’t share that cynicism about the Democratic party, especially not after last year, when Democrats stopped the President and the congress on Social Security, and especially not after the final three months of last year, when by standing together they stopped passage of the revised Patriot Act because it was insufficiently revised, almost stopped a terrible budget resolution that pays for tax breaks for the wealthy with benefit cuts for the middle and working class, did stop drilling in ANWR for now, and are now standing ready to demand of Alito that he actually answer their questions. Yes, they still need more coherence, they still suffer from a lack of cohesive leadership, from being seen as a minority party, and from the constant Gore-like drubbing they get from what Kos has recently suggested we call the "traditional" media, but I’m still happy to call the SCLM.

We stop Alito and the "conservative" judicial movement with Democrats as they are right this moment, or we don’t stop him at all. Nader isn’t going to stop him, Cindy Sheehan isn’t, the Green Party isn’t, nor, btw, should anyone take umbrage at that observation, I’m not attacking anyone, simply stating a fact.

How to help Democrats? By staying in touch with them, each of us, one by one, letting them know, through phone calls, emails and faxes, that we want them to challenge the administration, right down to the wire, and that we want them to challenge Alito to fully answer their questions, and if he doesn’t, or his answers are unsatisfactory, that we want them to filibuster, and to keep filibustering until George W. Bush finds a candidate that is acceptable to those Americans who voted for Democratic members of congress. If enough of us do this, we can tilt the balance of the coverage toward a recognition it is grassroots Americans who have doubts about this administration and their hand-picked candidate for the Supreme Court. A majority of Americans don’t want a Supreme Court that will make a radical turn to the right, as evidenced by the astonishing lack of popularity for the Republicans did in the Schiavo case, and by the 56% of Americans for whom even the threat of a terrorist attack is not enough to persuade them to give up their constitutional rights, both positions, remember, came as total surprises to the SCLM, many of whom are still predicting that liberals will be the losers on the NSA issue, and that Abramoff is a bipartisan scandal….

That is what happened to Robert Bork. The only person who "borked" Professor Bork was Professor Bork. What was decisive was the ability of the liberal/left and the Democrats in the Senate to convince a majority of Americans that Robert Bork's America, just as Kennedy pointed out and is roundly criticized to this very day so doing, was an America in which they wouldn't want to live.

More on that later, after the first committee session.