Bush Taps Alito For Supreme Court

Veteran Conservative Judge Is Bush Choice After Miers Is Withdrawn

(CBS/AP)  Conservative activist Gary Bauer, who also challenged Miers' nomination, said "At least now the president is having a battle with his political opponents and not with his friends. I will help him any way I can."

The White House quickly arranged for Alito to go to the Capitol, where he was to be meet Senate Majority Leader Bill First and accompany him to the Capitol Rotunda to go to the coffin of the late civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks.

Frist praised Alito, calling him "unquestionably qualified to serve on our nation's highest court."

Miers bowed out last Thursday after three weeks of bruising criticism from members of Mr. Bush's own party who argued that the Texas lawyer and loyal Bush confidant had thin credentials on constitutional law and no proven record as a judicial conservative.

Unlike Miers, who has never been a judge, Alito, a jurist from New Jersey, has been a strong conservative voice on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals since Mr. Bush's father, former President George H.W. Bush, seated him there in 1990.

"There is no doubt that this man is very qualified," reports CBS News correspondent Gloria Borger. "People consider him a brilliant jurist. And so you can't argue with qualifications. It's just his judicial philosophy."

White House officials had said Alito was virtually certain to get the nod from the moment Miers backed out. The 55-year-old jurist was the president's favorite choice of the judges in the last set of deliberations but he settled instead on someone outside what he calls the "judicial monastery," the officials said.

Mr. Bush believes that Alito has not only the right experience and conservative ideology for the job, but he also has a temperament suited to building consensus on the court. A former prosecutor, Alito has experience off the bench that factored into Mr. Bush's thinking, the officials said.

Judicial conservatives praise Alito's 15 years on the Philadelphia-based court, a tenure that gives him more appellate experience than almost any previous Supreme Court nominee. They say his record shows a commitment to a strict interpretation of the Constitution, ensuring that the separation of powers and checks and balances are respected and enforced. They also contend that Alito has been a powerful voice for the First Amendment's guarantees of free speech and the free exercise of religion.

Liberal groups, on the other hand, note Alito's moniker and say his nomination raises troubling concerns, especially when it comes to his record on civil rights and reproductive rights. Alito is a frequent dissenter on the 3rd Circuit, one of the most liberal federal appellate benches in the nation.

In the early 1990s, Alito was the lone dissenter in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a case in which the 3rd Circuit struck down a Pennsylvania law that included a provision requiring women seeking abortions to notify their spouses. That case went to the Supreme Court, where justices used it to reaffirm Roe v. Wade.

He has not been a down-the-line abortion foe, however. In 2000, Alito joined the majority that found a New Jersey law banning late-term abortions unconstitutional.

Alito is an Italian-American who grew up in Trenton, N.J. He was educated at Princeton University and earned a law degree from Yale University, the president's alma mater.