I don’t ask for much from our elected representatives – and that’s exactly what I get. I ask for low taxes, and taxes keep going up. I ask for fiscal responsibility, and government spending is through the roof. I ask for tough leadership, and I end up with the spineless senatorial wonder-twins Mike DeWine and George Voinovich.

But as I write this, it looks like I’ll finally have a wish granted, as Samuel Alito’s chances for confirmation by the Senate are improving daily. The Judiciary Committee is set to vote on Alito this week, and barring some desperate move from the Democratic windbags to the chairman’s left, he’ll make it through just fine.

Alito was one of the names on the “short list” for nomination, but was passed over the first time around for a Bush crony named Harriet Miers, who hardly measured up to most of her peers on the list, let alone a brilliant mind like Alito. But after some heavy pressure from his conservative base, Dubya got wise and nominated Alito when Miers withdrew, and ol’ Sammy-boy has been a source of controversy ever since.

But I suppose that’s par for the course, seeing as how Alito espouses a judicial philosophy that places the courts in their proper constitutional place. Naturally, this has the lefties flustered, since they have relied on the Supreme Court to impose their unpopular agenda on the American people for decades now. I mean really, can you imagine anything more horrible than letting elected officials make laws rather than presidential appointed judges? And let’s not forget that Alito would be the fifth Catholic on the court – alongside Thomas, Scalia, Kennedy, and the new chief justice, John Roberts. The horror, the horror!

Another point of controversy has to do with Alito’s membership in the group Concerned Alumni of Princeton, which, as the name suggests, is composed of several Princeton alumni who were dissatisfied with the direction their school was headed, each for his own reasons. Alito claims that he joined CAP because he disagreed with the attitude the Princeton faculty and administration took toward the university’s ROTC program, in which he was a cadet as an undergrad. His critics have tried to convince the public that Alito was part of an extremist cabal that discriminated against women and minorities, but there is no evidence to suggest that Alito’s involvement with CAP was anything but minimal. It’s funny that as the chief inquisitor on this matter at the confirmation hearings, Taxachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy cited the group’s supposedly discriminatory policies toward women as one of the main reasons why CAP caused his blood to boil so, as Kennedy was a long-time member of Harvard’s all-male Owl Club – the same type of sexist, elitist organization that he was so quick to demonize.

There are other attacks Alito’s enemies have leveled against him over the course of the past month or so, but none of them seem to stick – he seeks to expand federal power, he’ll destroy the right to privacy, etc. In fact, some of the things being said about Alito are so numerous and so outrageous it would take me the majority of the semester to tackle them all. But for now, it doesn’t look like I’ll have to.

Tony Cox is a senior philosophy major and a columnist for the Daily Kent Stater. Contact him at [email protected].