Dr. Tom Coburn is a Republican Senator from Oklahoma not Nebraska

"Mixing Messages on Alito" refers to Senator Tom Coburn as being from Nebraska. He is from Oklahoma.

I am not surprised that Joe Biden is undermining the Democrat's position on Judge Alito, as he did on the Gonzalez nomination and as he tried to do on the John Bolton nomination when he went on TV and said Democrats didn't have the votes to block the Bolton's bid for the UN ambassadorship (Democrats did eventually force a recess appointment). Biden has consistently been a source of weakness in the Democratic party by undermining its role as the opposition party. I hope people remember that if runs for president.

I just read Alito's dissent in Rymer, the example that Tim Russert used as proof of his proposition that Alito legislates from the bench. I, an extremely left-leaning lefty, was prepared to find further fodder for arguments against Alito's nomination. In Alito's dissent, my expectation was disappointed, for that dissent is not at all an attempt to legislate from the bench.

Instead, it is merely an analysis of a federal statute regulating the intrastate possession of automatic weapons using the method developed by the Supreme Court over a period of one hundred years. Alito stuck with that method in his analysis (a method, by the way, that was created for the most part by "liberal" judges attempting to use the Commerce Clause as a catch-all for legislation of things whose regulation it can easily be argued were intended in the Constitution to be the province of the states). He conlcuded that the statute at issue didn't pass muster, while noting that it would be easy for Congress to make the statute constitutional.

Alito might have been said to be legislating from the bench if he had suggested a new extension for this analytical method, or suggested that it be disregarded. Instead, he merely attempted to determine, using an existing structure, whether a federal statute was a constitutional use of Congress's power to legislate under the Commerce Clause. To determine the constitutionality of statutes is properly the province of an appellate justice. It is not "legislating from the bench". Russert should choose a different example.

A fight over Alito is just what the Republicans would love to have. It would energize their base, and keep the public eye off Republican corruption and Bush's Iraq malfeasance.

Alito could hang himself during confirmation hearings, but until then it's up to the Dems to appear statespersonlike and clean as a whistle. Moves like pointing out the Republican Congress' cover-up of the Bush Iraq debacle are the way to go for now.

Well put, johnalive! (" Biden has consistently been a source of weakness in the Democratic party by undermining its role as the opposition party. I hope people remember that if [he] runs for president.") Biden has already declared that he's in the 2008 presidential race so let's hope he decides not to try to retain his Senate seat (a seat he's held since 1972!). Even if the Dems win back the Senate in the 2006 mid-term elections we'll need stronger men than Biden in 2008.