Bloodless Coup

Fables of Activist Judges

You don't really need to mourn the loss of Underneath Their Robes, not when you have Scott Lemieux keeping you busy with the real, political science view of all you need to know about Alito:

As a follow-up to my previous post, Somerby notes today that he recently posted the contemporaneous reaction about Ginsburg's nomination from the Washington Post:

On the D.C. Court of Appeals, to which she was appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, she has become a swing vote. A 1988 computer study by Legal Times newspaper found that she had sided more with Republican-appointed colleagues than [with her] Democratic counterparts. In cases that were not unanimous, she voted most often with then-Judge Kenneth W. Starr, who became George Bush's solicitor general, and Laurence H. Silberman, a Reagan appointee still on the court.

So, in other words, the wild-eyed radical that the GOP generously let onto the Court voted most often in non-unanimous cases with well-known Trotskyite Ken Starr. Needless to say, we will not be seeing any similar data about Alito, because he's more conservative than the other Republican appointees on the 3rd Circuit, let alone the Democrats. Anybody drawing comparisons between Alito and Ginsburg, and saying that the Dems now have some obligation to rubber-stamp Alito, is a hack pure and simple.

My completely chaste, political science geek crush on LGM continues.