Who's Been Taken In?

That refrain from the song Big Tears by the musician Elvis Costello has been running through my mind since yesterday. The answer is, among others, the New York Times.

The Democrats' questions and implications about her husband's record appeared to get to Judge Alito's wife, Martha-Ann. She began crying as Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, defended her husband's character and rejected any suggestion that his membership in the alumni group made him a bigot, Mrs. Alito retreated to an anteroom, sobbing for some minutes.

While various parties are working hard to record the event as "the big bad Democrats made the nice lady cry", many of us watching the proceedings find that story preposterous.

For one thing, it was while an Alito partisan was actively heaping praise on Judge Alito that the waterworks started. We're to believe that she gamely withstood the actual questioning of the "big, bad" Dems only to crumple when a good guy was speaking? Maybe she was just tired of being a smiling background prop, and after two days of serving as set decoration was plain worn out? You try sitting in the background of a TV picture, constantly thinking about smiling and not scratching any embarrassing itches for hours on end. Listening to the Senators drone on is hard enough at home.

Perhaps it was that she was just tired of hearing Lindsay Graham's southern accent, after having already listened to him through a prep session for the nominee held in advance of the hearings. Maybe she was overcome by the spectacle of Mr. Graham's ethical lapse, actively preparing a candidate he is supposed to be evaluating in the hearings, and the depth the Republicans have sunk to in propelling her husband forward.

Skeptical leftie bloggers are even suggesting that the entire mini-drama was a stunt prepared by a crafty country lawyer and the nominee's wife to manipulate the media coverage. But that would imply a cynical Republican spin machine hard at work to distract from legitimate and factual examination of Alito's record.

And who would believe that?

WASHINGTON - On Dec. 1, Knight Ridder's Washington bureau sent a story analyzing the record of Judge Samuel Alito to our 32 daily newspapers and to the more than 300 papers that subscribe to the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service. Written by Stephen Henderson, Knight Ridder's Supreme Court correspondent, and Howard Mintz of the San Jose Mercury News, the story began:

"During his 15 years on the federal bench, Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito has worked quietly but resolutely to weave a conservative legal agenda into the fabric of the nation's laws."

Assisted by Washington bureau researcher Tish Wells, Henderson and Mintz spent nearly a month reading all of Alito's 311 published opinions, which are available in a commercial database or in the archives of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, where Alito has sat for 15 years.

Henderson and Mintz cataloged the cases by category - employment discrimination, criminal justice, immigration and so on - and analyzed each one with help from attorneys who participated on both sides of the cases and experts in those fields of law. They interviewed legal scholars and other judges, many of them admirers of Alito.

They concluded that, "although Alito's opinions are rarely written with obvious ideology, he's seldom sided with a criminal defendant, a foreign national facing deportation, an employee alleging discrimination or consumers suing big business."

You might find this neither surprising nor controversial. Alito, after all, was nominated by a president who said that his ideal Supreme Court justices were Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the high court's most reliably conservative members.

You'd be wrong.

Within days, the Senate Republican Conference circulated a lengthy memo headlined, "Knight Ridder Misrepresents Judge Alito's 15-year record."

Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, a leader in the Alito confirmation process, sent a letter to the editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, a Knight Ridder paper, denouncing the story as "neither objective nor accurate." The Inquirer published it on Dec. 7.

The White House offered an opinion piece by Jeffrey N. Wasserstein, a former Alito law clerk who identified himself as a Democrat and said his former boss "is capable of setting aside any personal biases he may have when he judges." Knight Ridder/Tribune distributed it to all of our papers and its subscribers on Dec. 11.

A conservative columnist, whose glowing tribute to Alito is now featured in television advertisements supporting the nominee, declared the Knight Ridder story "illiterate." ...

The controversy erupted again this week at Alito's confirmation hearings. After Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., referred to the Knight Ridder story, Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., introduced a critique of the story by the Republican staff of the Judiciary Committee into the record of the hearings. Kyl said the story, "has, to my understanding, been rather completely discredited." The first paragraph of the Republican critique, however, said the story was based on "dozens" of Alito's opinions, creating the false impression that Henderson and Mintz didn't examine the judge's entire body of published work.

The Republican National Committee circulated a blistering personal attack on Henderson to some reporters, taking quotes out of context in an attempt to portray him as biased.

The RNC said Henderson "admitted he was previously an editorial writer," as though that very public part of a distinguished reporter's career was a secret that he'd been trying to hide. The RNC statement then linked Henderson to editorials he didn't write.

Talk about trying to make someone cry.

Despite the repeated scolding comments of Schoolmarm Graham, the Democratic questioning has been extraordinarily polite, unless one considers it rude to expect clear and direct answers from someone asking to be given a lifetime appointment to a position of historical importance. Considering Judge Alito's unwillingness to even give definite answers that would merely reveal the conservative judicial credentials that are the very reason he was nominated in the first place, the Democrats have been remarkably restrained in their exasperation. Nonetheless, I'm now listening to Orrin Hatch quite angrily disparaging questions about Vanguard.

It's the citizens of the country who believe that Supreme Court nominations should be approached with seriousness and without cynical partisanship who have really been reduced to tears.