Judge Dread
Alito is just plain wrong -- and scarily so -- for a number of reasons says The New York Times editorial board;

Judge Samuel Alito Jr.'s insistence that the U.S. Constitution does not protect abortion rights is not the only alarming aspect of a newly released memo he wrote in 1985. That statement strongly suggests that Alito is far outside the legal mainstream and that senators should question him closely about it. They should be prepared to reject his nomination to the Supreme Court if he cannot put to rest the serious concerns that the memo, part of a job application, raises about his worthiness to join the court.

When Alito applied for a job with the Justice Department under President Ronald Reagan, he submitted a Personal Qualifications Statement that outlined his approach to the law. That statement raises three major concerns:

First, he has extreme views on the law. Alito said he was particularly proud of his work on cases that tried to establish that "the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion." He did not merely oppose Roe v. Wade in the abstract - he worked to reverse it. He also noted his "disagreement with Warren Court decisions" in many important areas, including reapportionment. The reapportionment cases established the one-man-one-vote doctrine, which requires that congressional and legislative districts include roughly equal numbers of people. They played a key role in making American democracy truly representative, and are almost uniformly respected by lawyers and scholars.

Second, Alito does not respect precedent. Judicial nominees who appear extreme often claim that because they respect precedent, they will vote to reaffirm decisions they disagree with. The Senate has specific reason to be skeptical about Alito. Not only did he work to overturn Roe v. Wade, but he also said he had been inspired to go to law school by his opposition to Warren Court precedents - presumably by a desire to see them overturned.

Third, he is an ideologue. The White House has tried to present Alito as an impartial judge without strong political views. But he said just the opposite in the 1985 statement. "I am and always have been a conservative," he wrote. He strongly suggested that he would have been active in Republican politics if the law had not prohibited him, as a federal employee, from doing that.

Of course, he's not a real conservative, but a George Bush-style conservative, which is no conservative at all, but, in large part, a religious ideologue with a more passable name for his fundanutter beliefs.