I’ve never voted for George W. Bush or been on his side since he was barely elected president in 2001, but I am now.

Section 2 of Article 2 of the Constitution says that the President appoints the members of the Supreme Court with the “advice and consent of two-thirds of Senators present.” One of the two female members, Sandra Day O’Connor, decided to retire, and most people wanted him to replace her with another woman. He made a pitiful try – a Texas woman lawyer who had been on his payroll for years but had never been a judge – but now he is asking the Senate to approve Samuel A. Alito Jr., who has been a judge on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia for 15 years.

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From what you read about him you have to think he would be a good man for the job. He’s the son of an Italian immigrant. His father and mother were school teachers in New Jersey. He is a graduate of Princeton and studied law at Yale. When he graduated, he wrote in his yearbook that his goal was to be on the Supreme Court. He was in ROTC, saw duty in the Signal Corps after graduation and was discharged as a captain in 1980. Then he became a lawyer for several different federal offices in Washington. George W. Bush’s father appointed him to the Court of Appeals.

But now, the far-lefts of the Democrats are doing everything to keep him from going to the Supreme Court. Their purpose is not to keep a bright young man off the Supreme Court but rather to make President Bush look bad and to prevent the filling of the seat until Bush leaves office. They know that the Republicans have enough votes to put Alito on the court, so their plan is to get enough votes (41) to start a filibuster so that the Alito nomination is never ever voted on. It takes 60 votes to stop a filibuster, and the Republicans probably could not produce that many. These far-left Democrats hate Bush that much.

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Democrats are putting out all sorts of stories about Alito. Their main one is that they have found a memorandum Judge Alito wrote 20 years ago that said that the Supreme Court’s decision of Roe v. Wade, which made abortion legal, ought to be overturned. Even if there is such a memorandum, isn’t it possible that Alito might have changed his mind since he was only 23 when Roe v. Wade was decided by the Supreme Court? Anyway, I certainly don’t want to see that happen, but the polls show that opposition to Roe v. Wade is increasing.

Alito is undoubtedly a conservative but hardly an immoderate. In college, he fought hard to end discrimination against homosexuals. In his job as a judge in New Jersey, he upheld the partial birth abortion law. The American Bar Association, which has been evaluating the credentials of nominees for federal judges for 50 years, reported last week that Alito received a unanimous, well-qualified rating from the association’s federal judiciary committee. It is the highest rating the association gives.

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It will be most unfortunate for all of us if the Democrats insist on shutting down the Congress in order to keep Alito from going to the Supreme Court. They should be spending their time trying to find the Democrat who can be a president and get elected in three years. There are so many problems in this country that all our politicians should start spending their time to solve them rather than shutting down the Congress over who is going on the Supreme Court. Our country has many problems, more than I can ever remember.

We are losing jobs to foreign countries by the thousands. The cost of nearly everything is going up – even stamps. Yet, the Republican Congress refuses to raise the minimum wage. Large parts of the country have been seriously harmed by storms and floods, and many Americans are suffering. Thousands of Latin Americans are pouring into the country taking jobs away from Americans, and the new Bush system of medicine for old folks is so complicated that most of the people are not signing up. Can you believe that the Ford motor company, one of the things that made this country great, lost $8 billion last year?

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Of course, our greatest problem is the war that we should never have started. But we did because a small group convinced President Bush that it was the thing to do. I don’t criticize the president who is tapping the telephone of any person in America who is talking to Muslim people abroad. These people killed 3,000 of us by crashing four airplanes into New York City, Pennsylvania and Washington and even more of them are killing our sons and daughters in Iraq and Afghanistan and other people in places like Spain, Great Britain, etc.

Did you read last week about 32 Iraqis who were killed by one of those suicide bombers who mixed himself in with the crowd during the funeral of a 14-year-old boy one of the suicide bombers had killed just the day before?

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