Samalito, jump a little lighter!

While on the subject of SCOTUS nominees, I’ve frankly been a bit surprised, given so much focus on the newest nom’s nickname (“Scalito”) that more political hay hasn’t been made of his 20-year friendship with another Jersey boy, Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff.

Back in 1987, the same year that Trenton native Scalia was appointed associate justice of the Supreme Court, President Reagan named fellow Trenton native Sam Alito – then Ed Meese’s deputy assistant – to be U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey. Among his first acts on the job was to recruit as his First Assistant an up-and-coming young prosecutor (and Elizabeth native) by the name of Michael Chertoff away from the position he held across the Hudson River, in the office of the then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York -- Rudolph Giuliani.

Three years later, President George H.W. Bush gave a boost to both Alito’s and Chertoff’s careers, naming Alito to the Third Circuit, where he has served to this day, and Chertoff to be his successor as U.S. Attorney for New Jersey.

Chertoff would later be tapped by the younger President Bush to serve under John Ashcroft, before he was once again reunited with Alito in 2003 by being named, himself, to the Third Circuit. Over the proceeding two years, until Chertoff was named to the Homeland Security post, the two seem to have served on the same panels an unusually large number of times (I’ve never been entirely clear on how panels are selected, but in searching the decisions, their names are on the same cases at a frequency far above what pure chance would seem to predict.)

They nearly always ruled together, which perhaps isn’t so remarkable as one of the notable cases where they disagreed. In 2004’s Doe v. Groody, Chertoff wrote the majority opinion that held the strip search of a 10-year-old and her mother, in a drug case where police had a warrant only to search a man and his home, constituted a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Alito's dissent held that, since the girl and her mom were “in” the house to be searched, any part of their persons was also fair game.

Now, obviously, if having a personal history with members of the nominating administration were sufficient grounds for exclusion, there isn’t a judge out there who would pass the test. But as cases reach the high court – as they almost certainly will, eventually – challenging the Patriot Act, which Chertoff wrote, or the government’s handling of Hurricane Katrina, which he had a big hand in bungling, is Sam Alito really the guy I want deciding those matters?

As we say in the Garden State – foogeddabowdit.

Comments

[nalgene]

Alito's mother is named, I kid you not, Rose Alito:

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=15522002&BRD=1697&PAG=461&dept_id=44551&rfi=6