Advocacy groups push new Alito ads
The Detroit News
Wednesday, January 4, 2006
David D. Kirkpatrick / New York Times Liberals, conservatives hope to sway public as hearings approach for Supreme Court nominee.WASHINGTON-- In the final days before hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., partisans on both sides are pulling out all the stops to sway public opinion. Moving beyond Alito's judicial record, a coalition of liberal groups is preparing commercials attacking his integrity and credibility, several people involved in the effort said Monday. Conservatives, for their part, are capitalizing on ethnic pride to rally Italian-American support for Alito with public events and newspaper advertisements. The efforts are aimed particularly at the Northeastern states where some moderate Republican senators have expressed doubts about his confirmation. In Arkansas, home to two moderate Democratic senators whose votes are considered to be in play, the Judicial Confirmation Network is running Christmas-themed commercials on African-American gospel radio stations. In them, the Rev. Bill Owen, a black pastor, urges support for Alito to protect public displays of Nativity scenes and menorahs and to uphold the right of schoolgirls to "draw pictures of our savior, Jesus Christ, for class projects." The advertising campaigns on both sides are the most visible components of a last-minute push by advocacy groups anticipating a potentially close Senate vote. With the hearings set to begin Monday, both sides are seeking to open new fronts in the lobbying battle. Liberals are adding new issues to commercials about Alito's judicial record that began months ago, while conservatives are reaching out to groups usually found in the Democratic ranks. People involved in the liberal coalition, which includes People for the American Way, the legal group Alliance for Justice, the AFL-CIO, the NAACP, the Sierra Club and abortion rights groups, said it planned to run new commercials, beginning this week with radio and television advertisements in targeted states aimed at undercutting Alito's credibility. They said the first advertisements would focus on occasional lapses from a pledge Alito made at the 1990 hearings for his confirmation to the appeals court that he would recuse himself from cases involving the companies that managed his mutual fund investments, Vanguard and Smith Barney. Legal ethics experts say judges are not obliged to recuse themselves in such cases. There are two known lapses during Alito's 15 years on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. He has said they were inadvertent and occurred long after the initial period covered by his pledge. But the liberal groups plan to highlight differences in his explanations about the cases over time. Steve Schmidt, a White House spokesman handling the nomination, called the allegations "outrageous." "Judge Alito has gone through his entire life with a sterling reputation for integrity," Schmidt said, declaring that the liberal coalition had "decided to throw mud against the wall and see if it sticks."
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