Because whether you're a top White House official, or a nominee for Supreme Court justice, it doesn't matter what kind of lies you make up under oath so long as you're a Republican.
When other judges have submitted answers to written questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee during confirmation, those answers have been under oath. One assumes Scooterlito's written answers to the US Senate Judiciary Committee for his lower court nomination hearings - the ones where he repeatedly said he would recuse himself from cases, then after he was confirmed, he did the opposite - were as well. That's an outright lie in order to trick the Senators into confirming. One might even call that perjury.
So, the man is a liar, ethically challenged, and will say anything under oath to get confirmed.
In a written response to questions from the US Senate during his 1990 confirmation hearings to be an appeals judge, Samuel Alito promised: ''I would disqualify myself from any case involving my sister's law firm, Carpenter, Bennett & Morrissey of Newark, New Jersey." His sister left that firm in 1994, and she said yesterday that she joined McCarter & English in March 1994 -- about a year before the full court denied a rehearing in the bank-loan case.But of course, there are some Democrats who don't seem very troubled being lied to, under oath, by Alito repeatedly in an effort to trick them into voting for him. One such Senator is perennial waffler Kent Conrad (D-ND).
Samuel Alito's promise to disqualify himself from hearing cases in which he faced a potential conflict of interest has become a focal point for Democratic critics as they prepare for his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in January.
In his questionnaire, provided to the Senate during his confirmation hearings as an appeals court judge, Samuel Alito cited four types of cases in which he would disqualify himself to avoid a potential conflict of interest: those involving Vanguard, in which he owned mutual fund shares; Smith Barney, his brokerage firm; First Federal Savings & Loan of Rochester, N.Y., which held his home mortgage; and his sister's law firm.
Alito ruled in a 2002 case in Vanguard's favor at a time when he owned between $390,000 and $975,000 in mutual fund shares from Vanguard.
He withdrew from the case after a complaint was filed by Shantee Maharaj, a Massachusetts woman who wanted Vanguard to give her the assets of her late husband's mutual funds.
Nonetheless, he wrote a letter to the chief circuit judge in 2003 complaining about the effort to remove him from the case. ''I do not believe that I am required to disqualify myself based on my ownership of the mutual fund shares," he wrote.
When Alito became a federal appeals court judge in 1990, he promised to recuse himself from cases involving Vanguard mutual funds, because he had personal investments through the company. Yet he participated in a case decided in 2002 involving Vanguard....Yeah, I mean, come on. Sure, Alito is willing to lie, and quite possible perjure himsel, committing a felony in the process, in order to trick Kent Conrad and other Senators into confirming him, but Kent Conrad is apparently impressed by those lies, they're actually quite favorable lies, so Conrad might support him anyway.
Sen. Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat who met with Alito on Wednesday, said he shared his colleague's concerns about Vanguard, but his overall impression of Alito was favorable and he was unlikely to support any bid to kill the nomination.
Another installment in Democratic profiles in courage.
PS And when it comes down to it. The Democrats have NO Right to criticize Scooter Libby and Karl Rove for lying under oath if they are willing to give Scooterlito a pass for doing the exact same thing.
