How about all those cases from 15 years on the bench? There's this:
[B]y articulating a narrow view of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, he is viewed as a judge who would be skeptical of the involvement of federal regulators in matters he views to be strictly within the province of state officials.(Could you use the word "view" a few more times?)
Does this refer to anything other than the one case in which, following the recent Supreme Court precedent in the Gun-Free School Zones case (Lopez), he concluded that a federal law prohibiting the possession of machine guns did not fit the commerce power? In that case, Rybar, Alito wrote:
The activity that the Lopez Court found was not "economic" or "connected with a commercial transaction" was a type of intrastate firearm possession, i.e., the possession of a firearm (including a machine gun) within a school zone. At issue here is another type of purely intrastate firearm possession, i.e., the purely intrastate possession of a machine gun. If the former must be regarded as non-economic and non-commercial, why isn't the same true of the latter? Is possession of a machine gun inherently more "economic" or more "commercial" than possession of other firearms. Is the possession of a firearm within a school zone somehow less "economic " and "commercial" than possession elsewhere -- say, on one's own property? If there are distinctions of constitutional dimension here, they are too subtle for me to grasp. It seems to me that the most natural reading of Lopez is that the simple possession of a firearm, without more, is not "economic" or "commercial" activity....Note the struggle with Lopez's commercial/noncommercial distinction. Now, explain how the limit on the commerce power Alito perceived shows that he would undercut federal law relating to businesses (and specifically large corporations as opposed to smaller operations).
Labaton concedes that there are cases where Alito decided against business interests:
In 1991, a year after he got to the bench, for instance, he issued a dissent in which he ruled that foreign seamen on American-flag ships should be covered by the minimum wage provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act. And in a dissent from a 2000 decision, he interpreted the statute-of-limitations provision of a race discrimination law to the benefit of the plaintiff in an employment case. In a third case, he voted with two other judges to dismiss an industry challenge to tougher environmental law standards in coal mining.Because why deal with the first hand evidence? We'll report on some outcomes (and ignore the reasoning and the case law that bound him), but let's get to what really matters: what the "supporters and critics" think is true.
But those three cases, Cruz v. Chesapeake Shipping, Zubi v. AT&T, and Pennsylvania Coal Association v. Bruce Babbitt, are considered by both supporters and critics to be exceptions.
This is an article about Alito's bias?
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2 comments:
Prof Althouse, you're a one-lady-fisking machine!
This is the SCOTUS we're talking about, so why do you keep on talking about things like reasoning and case law?
Paul: Great question. I think it's partly that it's easier to study a smaller set of cases, but also there's a sense that it no one else joined him, it's more likely that he's "out of the mainstream." Thus, the cases where he's alone are more significant. But since he usually doesn't dissent, a lot of evidence that he is not extreme is not getting counted.
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