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Like the video of the plane crashing into the Twin Towers replayed in slow-mo, the stacking of the US Supreme Court with far-right authoritarians-- foretold with the reelection of G.W. Bush-- now unfolds before our eyes. But from the media soundtrack accompanying reports of Samuel Alito's nomination to the high court, you'd think the horror-show was a love-story. In large part, it's really a sex story-- about how Alito wormed his way into the hearts of the right-wing by expanding the state's ability to punish sex, and the people who have it.

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Alito has been hailed in the mainstream media as "brilliant," "principled" "impartial," his rulings marked by a "libertarian" streak, and showing exquisite regard for the First-Amendment. J.L. Pottenger, self-professed "maybe ultra-liberal" Yale law professor, cooed in the New York Times about Alito being "honest" and "well-intentioned," an all-around great choice. But Alito's record shows the 55-year-old judge to be a vicious, legally calculating tool of state and corporate power against the weak and vulnerable-- particularly the sexually marginal.

The strained quality of Alito's sense of justice is summed up in his decision in the case of Antuan Bronshtein, a murderer on Pennsylvania's death row, whose sentence, according to standards the US Supreme Court set down in 1994, should be vacated and changed to life-without-parole, on the grounds jurors weren't informed, before choosing execution, that "life meant life." Moreover, a lower Federal court had actually thrown out the murder conviction, which a higher court subsequently reinstated. Alito ruled in 2003 that because Bronshtein had missed, by a month, a state filing deadline to apply for the amnesty, he should be executed anyway. After all what's sanctity of human life when the sanctity of legal minutiae is at stake? Cavalier over killing, it's hard to believe this is the same Alito so troubled over abortion that he ruled that it's consistent with a woman's right to end her pregancy that she be required first to notify her husband.

Second choice, worse choice

To G.W. Bush, no respecter of life after birth, Alito's inconsistency hardly counts as a demerit. Bush picked Alito-- for 15 years a federal appeals judge on the 3rd Circuit, based in Philadelphia-- for the vacancy created by the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Bush's first choice, Harriet Miers-- his long-time personal legal assistant in Texas and then the White House-- withdrew after a right-wing backlash. Miers manages to be simultaneously a born-again Christian, never-married (lesbian? some wondered), a former lottery official, and donor to Democrat Al Gore's presidential campaign. With her complicated background, the Christian right feared she might not prove ideologically "reliable."

That's not a problem for Alito, with his 15-year record on the federal bench. Alito got his start working under Attorney General Edwin Meese in the Reagan Department of Justice, where he helped write a DOJ opinion that employers could legally fire people with AIDS out of "fear of contagion, whether reasonable or not." In legal circles, Meese is known for his promulgation of "original intent": the claim that constitutional questions should be decided in reference to what the framers thought (or what a judge today claims to think some of them did). But most people probably remember Meese for his eponymous commission against pornography.

Double jeopardy

It was probably the influence of his full-strength Catholicism more than Meese, but Alito's sexphobia often puts him in the minority, even among his peers in the federal judiciary-- a group, owing to years of Reagan-and-Bushes court-stacking, that already skews far to the right. And the same "principles" Alito invokes in punishing people around sex often vanish where they would constrain prosecutors, corporations, or machine-gun owners.

In a major 1996 ruling, Alito disagreed with his 3rd-Circuit peers, saying that New Jersey's "Megan's Law" didn't constitute ex post facto punishment when applied to persons convicted before the law was passed. The law, imitated throughout the West, requires people convicted of sex crimes-- ranging from public sex to rape-- to register and be publicly designated for life as "sex-predators." The Third Circuit's majority disagreed with Alito-- but their ruling was later overturned by the US Supreme Court. That decision led directly to the current situation: the creation of a class of Americans in a position akin to Jews under the early-Nazis or blacks under South African apartheid. America's sex registrees are subject to continual threat of attack, to arrest and years in prison for failing to regularly check in with police, are forced to live in specially designated areas, deprived of work, and, as in the case in October of a man with a 20-year-old sodomy conviction, have their children taken away from them at birth. These are all consequences which Alito-- with that talent for legal abstraction that earlier held "separate could be equal"-- declared could not be considered "punishment."

Getting off the bottle

A case involving jailhouse reading-matter seems almost trivial by comparison, but is also telling. Two men held in New Jersey's prison for sex criminals-- one of them a gay man serving 20-years for sex with a teenager-- went to court to challenge a law passed by the state legislature banning inmates at the facility from possessing any "sexually oriented material." Staff at the prison had opposed the law, contending that weaning their charges off the moonshine of, say, flashing or frottage and onto the lowfat-milk of, say, Playboy was exactly what they were there for. In any case, the First Amendment shines even into prison cells. But Alito reversed a district-court decision, and upheld the statute banning erotica, arguing that, whatever its possible irrationalities, it wasn't for a judge to second-guess legislative intentions. (Curiously, clipping lawmakers' wings wasn't a problem for Alito when he wrote a dissent contending that Congress had no right to ban possession of machine guns, on the grounds that this was an unconstitutional restriction of interstate commerce.)

The extent to which prisoners are, for Alito, nonpersons shows up in his decision to allow Pennsylvania authorities to bar any reading matter, except religious and legal tracts, from inmates in punitive detention, and even to bar possession of photos of family members.

Seeking horse dick, finding more

And yet while Alito is deeply concerned about punishing sodomites and other criminals, when it's the state that forcibly strips and prods people-- kiddies included-- he completely understands. The judge ruled in 2004 that police did not violate the conditions of their search warrant during a raid of the home of a Pennsylvania drug suspect when they strip-searched his wife and 10-year-old daughter, who were not targets of the warrant.

Indeed, Alito has proven untroubled by the state's probing fingers, cameras, or electrodes, no matter where they go. He ruled in 2003, with the majority, that mandatory polygraph tests to gauge compliance with parole conditions were not an additional punishment for a man convicted in a porn case, even though the plea agreement to which he consented made no mention of them.

A therapist giving Alito a once-over would detect serious "issues with boundaries" when it comes to the Fourth-Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure. Look at a 2002 decision involving a Pennsylvania high-school teacher and basketball coach who was accused of making come-ons to boys on his team, and letting them see porn on his computer. According to an outraged mother, who said she had quizzed some of the youths, one of the porn clips showed a woman giving a horse a blow-job.

On the strength of her claim, police obtained a search warrant to find the clip in question, and after raiding his home and seizing his computer, they did. But they also found a clip of internet porn they said showed minors, and the man was found guilty of possessing it. A panel of Third-Circuit judges threw out the conviction, on the grounds that police had a warrant to search only for the horse-woman sex clip, and seeking anything else would constitute an illegal fishing expedition. But Alito dissented: it was clear from the accusations what kind of person the teacher was, he declared, and this was all that was needed to justify prosecuting anything sexual they found.

And in a 2004 bribery case, Alito ruled that the FBI's audiovisual bugging of a hotel suite didn't require a warrant because one couldn't have had any expectation of privacy in so public a place-- a position one suspects Alito would not have sustained were the eavesdropper a peeping-Tom peering into the bathroom from next door.

Double-faced

So far, attention to Alito's sexual obsessions have focused on abortion rights, with Alito lobbying senators about his enormous "respect" for Roe v. Wade. In November, the Reagan library released a letter Alito sent when soliciting employment from Meese, in which he states his belief that Roe v. Wade lacks constitutional basis, yet the admission of Alito's duplicity has barely slowed his confirmation juggernaut.

That duplicity runs through Alito's legal career, even when he appears to be grasping for high principle. It's not clear, for instance, that creating a decent school environment is aided by prohibiting just certain kinds of harassing speech. But when Alito invoked the First Amendment in 2001 in a majority ruling to throw out a school speech-code banning anti-gay barbs, it was clear, given his well-documented contempt for free expression other places, that anti-gay animus was the prime motive. The impulse to dot every 'i' and cross every 't' Alito invokes when dealing with, say, death-row inmates' appeals goes out the window when the technicalities are about quashing over-reaching search warrants. And there's no chance Alito would throw out Federal marijuana laws or sex statutes-- as opposed to gun regs-- in his zeal to protect states from infringement on cross-border commerce.

Alito's opportunism runs rife through the "strict intentions" crowd with which he hangs. For all their invocation of original intent, "originalists" cherry-pick their principles-- ignoring, for instance, the American Founding Fathers' "clear intent" that slavery wasn't a constitutional problem. Indeed, looking at recent Federal decisions on, say, Guantanamo detainees, the hard-right shows a certain nostalgia for that peculiar institution. Men kill what they profess to love, said Oscar Wilde. If he's elevated to the Supreme Court, Alito and his fellow authoritarians look set to do to the US Constitution what the 9/11 hijackers did to the Twin Towers.