As reported at Edward Still’s Votelaw, Senator Biden (D-Del.) says that the part of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito’s record that jeopardizes his confirmation more than his views on abortion is the part in which he expressed disagreement with the Warren Court’s Baker v. Carr decision on reapportionment.
As I have alluded to before, it is bad enough that our archaic, unrepresentative federal electoral systems (for President and Senate, as well as House) combine with the way we select Supreme Court justices to allow one party (even if it were a majority in the electorate, as the current seat-holding majority is not) to use court appointments in an effort to facilitate a partisan agenda. It is an order of magnitude worse if part of that agenda might include reversing one of the far-too-few advances this country has made in many decades towards more representative elections: the abolition of malapportionment in state legislatures.
The fact that Alito has specifically singled out Baker v. Carr as one of the Supreme Court rulings that drove him to pursue a legal career means he is unfit to serve on the highest court. If Democratic senators cannot filibuster a man with such profoundly reactionary views about democratic institutions, they might as well resign en masse.
