‘Perfect Storm’ Looming in Alito Confirmation

By Melissa Charbonneau
White House Correspondent

CBN.com –WASHINGTON - Some Democratic senators are questioning whether or not Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito will be confirmed.

They say they have concerns and questions about his views. Many conservatives believe the Senate should use Alito's confirmation hearing for a debate about judicial activism.

The pending Senate confirmation battle over Alito is a fight conservatives have been waiting on for years.

Professor Eugene Volokh of UCLA School of Law remarked, “Many conservatives fault some Supreme Court decisions as just making stuff up and as just representing the will of the justices untied to the text of the Constitution. Untied to the original meaning the framers intended.”

Liberal legal scholars say the Constitution is an evolving document, and interpreting as it was written in the 1700s would mean huge setbacks for the rights of individuals, and for women and minorities.

“If we follow the originality approach to the Constitution, the document to mean what it meant long ago, all of those rights involving both liberty and equality are in great jeopardy,” declared University of Chicago Law School Professor Cass Sunstein.

But conservatives say there is nothing in the Constitution that makes abortion legal, and they hope Alito will change that decision once he gets on the bench.

James Dobson of Focus on the Family stated, “My prayer has been that these kind of changes would take place on the court, because what's at stake? The killing of babies -- we've already lost 43 million since 1973.”

And other Christian conservatives are hoping for justices who won't legislate from the bench.

“We need to have a reigning-in of what we consider to be a runaway federal judiciary that is seeking to impose its will on the American people,” said Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention.

The looming court battle is a fight over a whole host of social issues: the role of religion in the public square, the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, and whether same-sex marriage is constitutional -- all issues that could come before the court.

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