2008 Woodie Awards
Abortion not a Right Guaranteed by Constitution
Kyle Hatt
Issue date: 2/21/06 Section: Opinion
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During the confirmation hearings for
Supreme Court nominee Judge Samuel
Alito Jr., members of the Senate Judiciary
Committee asked questions about the existence
and definition of so-called fundamental
rights believed to be protected by
the Constitution.
These questions were
part of an attempt to learn whether Judge
Alito believed that a fundamental right to
privacy, recognized by the Supreme Court
in its 1965 decision Griswold v.
Connecticut, protects the right for a pregnant
woman to have an abortion. But these
senators ignored the fact that while they
must represent their constituents, Justice
Alito's duty would be to the words of the
Constitution.
His constitutional role as an interpreter
of our laws means that the answers
to their questions about the right to have
an abortion should not be for him to
decide.
Judge Alito ascribes to the "textualist"
approach to judicial philosophy practiced
by current Supreme Court Justices
Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. For
his shared understanding of the
Constitution with Justice Scalia, Judge
Alito has been called "Scalito" and
"Scalia-lite" (and not usually as a complement).
Under the textualist approach of interpreting
the Constitution, it is, of course,
the words of the Constitution itself which
are most important, and they are to be
interpreted according to the intentions of
those who wrote them, and in congruence
with the legal traditions of the United
States. The beauty of the textualist philosophy
is that it makes the business of dealing
with questions of fundamental rights
relatively easy.
Freedom of speech is quickly recognized
by a textualist as one of the fundamental
rights protected by the
Constitution, because as the First
Amendment says, "Congress shall make
no law abridging the freedom of speech."
On the other hand, it should not much
longer conclude that the right to have an
Supreme Court nominee Judge Samuel
Alito Jr., members of the Senate Judiciary
Committee asked questions about the existence
and definition of so-called fundamental
rights believed to be protected by
the Constitution.
These questions were
part of an attempt to learn whether Judge
Alito believed that a fundamental right to
privacy, recognized by the Supreme Court
in its 1965 decision Griswold v.
Connecticut, protects the right for a pregnant
woman to have an abortion. But these
senators ignored the fact that while they
must represent their constituents, Justice
Alito's duty would be to the words of the
Constitution.
His constitutional role as an interpreter
of our laws means that the answers
to their questions about the right to have
an abortion should not be for him to
decide.
Judge Alito ascribes to the "textualist"
approach to judicial philosophy practiced
by current Supreme Court Justices
Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. For
his shared understanding of the
Constitution with Justice Scalia, Judge
Alito has been called "Scalito" and
"Scalia-lite" (and not usually as a complement).
Under the textualist approach of interpreting
the Constitution, it is, of course,
the words of the Constitution itself which
are most important, and they are to be
interpreted according to the intentions of
those who wrote them, and in congruence
with the legal traditions of the United
States. The beauty of the textualist philosophy
is that it makes the business of dealing
with questions of fundamental rights
relatively easy.
Freedom of speech is quickly recognized
by a textualist as one of the fundamental
rights protected by the
Constitution, because as the First
Amendment says, "Congress shall make
no law abridging the freedom of speech."
On the other hand, it should not much
longer conclude that the right to have an