Graham's Sharp Approach to the Princeton Question

The interesting portion of the Graham/Alito discourse is on C-SPAN and if you pull it up in Real Player it's at about the 2hr and 44 min mark.

Sen Lindsey Graham (SC) wanted to lay to rest speculation that Alito's past contains evidence of gender and race-based discrimination. Those senators doing the speculating have focused on Alito's membership in the Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP). Alito listed his membership in this group on his 1985 application to the Reagan justice department. In this week's confirmation hearings, Alito has said he doesn't know why he listed his membership in CAP and has insisted that he was not active in CAP and, further, that he disavows CAP's commitment to limiting the admission of women and minorities at Princeton.

So this is what Graham does. He goes and finds other examples of selective societies within the Princeton student body. He focuses on so-called "eating societies," which were apparently groups of upperclass students at Princeton that got together at private, off-campus locations for meals. Importantly, there were not just eating societies but also "selective eating societies," which unlike regular eating societies were private, or open to not-just-anyone. You had to apply to get in, and you had to be selected. So Graham asks Alito, "Were you a member of a selective eating society?" Alito, "No. I was not." Graham, "Did people not like you or...? [Laughter in the chamber] Or you just didn't apply?" Alito says, "I didn't apply."

Graham then says, "Well let me tell you who did apply." And he goes on to list Donald Rumsfeld and Woodrow Wilson. He then had Alito disavow and deplore an article written by someone in CAP. And Graham says, Well the skeptical part of me says maybe you're just disavowing these statements because you want to get on the Supreme Court. So, Graham asks, how can we get to the bottom of this? Graham thinks, maybe we should look at how Alito has lived his life.

"Are you a closet bigot?" asks Graham.

"I'm not any kind of a bigot," says Alito.

"No, sir, you're not and you know why I believe that, not cause you just said it though I believe that to be a good-enough reason; [but] because I've got reams of quotes from people who have worked with you: African American judges...law clerks, men and women, black and white...and you know why I believe you when you say you disavow those quotes? Because of the way you have lived your life and the way you and your wife are raising your children. Let me tell you this: guilt by association is going to drive good men and women away from wanting to sit where you are sitting.... Judge Alito, I am sorry that you have had to go through this. [And this is where Ms. Alito, who is beginning to shed tears, excuses herself from the room] I am sorry that your family has had to sit here and listen to this."

It's going to be Graham's dialogue right here that characterizes these hearings, and Ms. Alito's tears and exit from the room. As Graham moved on to some of Justice Ginsburg's writings, he made everyone recall that prospective justices with much more explicit and extreme-to-one-side views have met far less hostility than what Alito has faced this week. Well played.