While liberal and conservative groups alike are
poring over the record of Judge Sam Alito to decipher where he stands on Roe v. Wade, who are those guys
over in the shadows, grinning from ear to ear? Ah, those are the executives and lobbyists of
corporate America, and they don’t care whether Bush’s new
Supreme Court nominee even has a position on abortion. They’re all
grins because they know that he’s a dyed-in-the-wool, tried-and-true,
hardcore corporatist who can be counted on to favor big business over
workers, consumers, environmentalists, shareholders, small competitors, and
anyone else entangled in a court case against corporate power. After 15 years as a federal appeals judge, Alito has
an extensive paper trail showing that he’s been a reliable and ardent
champion of the corporate side in practically every case that comes before
him. “We’re always happy to see Judge Alito on the
panel,” says a Philadelphia lawyer whose firm represents some of
America’s largest corporations. Indeed, in several big cases, Bush’s nominee
has tried to prevent employees from suing corporations for sexual and
racial discrimination, tried to protect monopolists from facing antitrust
judgments, tried to stop environmental groups from suing polluters, and
tried to reduce fines that corporate wrongdoers have to pay. As a beaming
spokesman for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce put it, “He has come down
on a host of issues in a way that the business community would
prefer,” and adds, “This is not a guy who is going to go off
the reservation.”
We already have a court full of judges who side with
the corporate powers. It would be good for our country and for the workaday
majority of Americans if we had at least one Supreme Court justice with the
independence and integrity to go off the corporate reservation.
This article appears in Dec 1-7, 2005.
