Wider Fight Is Seen as Alito Victory Appears Secured
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is all but certain, yet the fight over his nomination heated up on Friday as
both sides seized on it as a flashpoint for Senate races in the fall and future
court selections.
Despite growing certainty about the ultimate conclusion after five days of
hearings, interest groups on both sides announced plans on Friday to spend
hundreds of thousands of dollars on television commercials intended to influence
the outcome.
And within moments of dismissing the last witnesses on Friday, Republicans
and Democrats on the Judiciary Committee traded accusations of bad faith in a
dispute over when the committee and the Senate would vote on confirmation.
Officials of liberal groups insisted that they still held hope of blocking
confirmation. Conservative organizers, on the other hand, said privately that
their advertisements were partly a victory lap to call attention to a fight the
president was winning after a spate of setbacks.
But behind the new advertisements and the partisan bickering are also
political calculations about how the vote may play out in this year's Senate
races, and about what kind of benchmark the vote count will set for the next
Supreme Court vacancy.
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is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, declared his support for Judge Alito on
Friday and said he expected a party-line vote of the committee's 10 Republicans
and 8 Democrats. But after the committee votes, Mr. Specter predicted, the
politics of the final vote will be messier.
"They will get out that big map with red and blue, and where
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and what happened to
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Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the former Democratic majority leader who
led fights against Republican judicial nominees and was defeated in 2004 by a
conservative Republican who made that an issue.
It will be "all that sort of high level principle," Mr. Specter said.
Members of both parties said that the number of votes that Judge Alito
received would help lay groundwork for the selection and reception of the next
court nominee. Republicans have often cited the 78 votes to confirm Chief
Justice John G. Roberts Jr. last year as evidence that President Bush's judicial
picks are in the mainstream.
"Make no mistake about it," said Senator
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of the Judiciary Committee, "had we not put up the fight we put up with the
judicial nominations all along, you would have more conservative people on the
Supreme Court."
Officials of the liberal groups acknowledged the goal of laying groundwork,
but insisted they were still building momentum to defeat Judge Alito's
confirmation.
"Rather than talking about '06, rather than talking about the next
nomination, we have got the Alito nomination before us," said Wade Henderson,
executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and a leader of
the anticonfirmation effort.
The coalition, which also includes organized labor and abortion rights and
environmental groups, said on Friday that it planned to broadcast advertisements
that quoted from Judge Alito's testimony. The commercials are scheduled to run
over the next week on national news programs and in Washington.
On the other side, Progress for America, a group with close ties to the
Republican Party and the White House, said it would spend almost $250,000 on a
national television advertising campaign that would call Democrats "shameful"
for their attacks on Judge Alito.
Chris Myers, executive director of the group, said liberal groups and
Democratic senators "will continue to scratch and claw up until the very, very
end, so we can't pop the Champagne corks."
Democratic senators and aides conceded privately, however, that confirmation
was almost a foregone conclusion. Only 2 of the 55 Republican senators -
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Island - have signaled serious concerns about the nomination. And in an
interview this week, Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the Democratic whip,
acknowledged that it would not be easy to hold together enough Democrats to stop
the confirmation with a filibuster, blocking the vote by a procedural move that
requires 41 votes.
Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, one of seven Democrats who signed a
bipartisan pact foreswearing judicial filibusters except in "extraordinary
circumstances," said this week that he did not see major reasons to oppose Judge
Alito. And in an interview on Friday, another one of the seven, Senator Kent
Conrad of North Dakota, said, "I don't think he'll have the votes that Judge
Roberts had, but I think he'll be confirmed."
Still, strategists for both parties said they hoped to use the continuing
debate over Judge Alito as a weapon in the fall, noting that midterm elections
usually depend on turning out the party faithful and that the nomination battle
had made Judge Alito the kind of polarizing figure who galvanized such
voters.
Democrats and liberal groups said they were taking aim at Mr. Chafee, Ms.
Snowe and Senator Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio, all of whom are under
pressure within their party to vote for confirmation but also face re-election
in socially liberal or at least closely divided states. Republicans, meanwhile,
said they were calling attention to the liberal Democratic attacks on Judge
Alito to squeeze moderate Democratic senators like Mr. Nelson, Mr. Conrad,
Senator Bill Nelson of Florida and Senator
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re-election in conservative states.
So far neither side of the Senate shows any signs of easing up. As he
dismissed the last round of witnesses on Friday, Mr. Specter opened a new
debate, accusing Democrats of breaching a "good-faith understanding" that the
committee would vote on Judge Alito next Tuesday so that the full Senate could
vote by the end of the week.
But Jim Manley, a spokesman for
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said the Democrats had never given up their right to a temporary delay. Mr.
Reid, Mr. Manley said, had asked Democrats to wait to cast any votes until after
the party met on Wednesday.
"The members have a right to carefully deliberate," Mr. Manley said. "It is
an important nomination."
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