FEINSTEIN, BOXER VOTE AGAINST ALITO CONFIRMATION, CITE RIGHTS CONCERNS

By Julia Cheever, Bay City News Service

January 31, 2006

California's two U.S. senators both voted against the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito today and said concerns over women's reproductive rights were a factor.

Alito, 55, previously a federal appeals court judge in Philadelphia, was sworn into office on the high court today after the Senate voted to confirm President Bush's nomination by a 58-42 vote.

Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, both Democrats from the Bay area, voted against confirmation.

Both cited concerns about women's reproductive rights when they joined the seven other Democratic women senators Monday in a series of statements explaining why all nine planned to vote against Alito.

Feinstein said, "I am very concerned about the impact Judge Alito could have on women's rights, including a woman's right to make certain reproductive choices as limited by state regulation."

Feinstein said she believed Alito's legal philosophy "will essentially swing the court far out of the mainstream." Boxer said, "To my mind, Judge Alito's ominous statement and narrow minded reasoning clearly signal a hostility to women's rights."

Boxer continued, "In the 21st century, it is astounding that a Supreme Court nominee would not view Roe v. Wade as settled law when its fundamental principle -- a woman's right to choose -- has been reaffirmed many times since it was decided."

Roe v. Wade was the 1973 decision in which the Supreme Court said women have a constitutional privacy right to abortion during the first two trimesters of pregnancy.

But a California group that opposes abortion and supports traditional values said Alito's confirmation "provides hope to pro family Americans that decades-old wrongs will be righted."

Randy Thomasson, president of the Sacramento-based Campaign for Children and Families, said, "Alito's strict constructionism is a breath of fresh air."

Thomasson said with Alito now on the bench, the nine-member high court "seems one vote away from eliminating partial-birth abortion, respecting marriage by a man and a woman, prosecuting obscenity, restoring parent rights in education and protecting religious expression in public life."

By coincidence, the confirmation vote came on the same day that two separate federal appeals courts struck down a U.S. abortion law that is likely to be considered by the Supreme Court.

Both the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco and the 2nd Circuit in New York upheld lower court rulings overturning a 2003 federal law known as the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.

A similar ruling issued by the 8th Circuit in St. Louis in a Nebraska case last year has already been appealed by the Justice Department to the Supreme Court.

Alito will participate in the panel's decision on whether to review the 8th Circuit ruling as well as the other two circuit court rulings if those are also appealed by the Justice Department.

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