Democratic
Senators On Judiciary Committee
Seek More Information From Supreme Court Nominee Alito
WASHINGTON (Friday, Dec. 9) -- The
Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee sent the
following letter to Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito seeking
more information relating to his nomination to be Associate
Justice. In their letter, Senators have asked Judge Alito to
provide information omitted from the questionnaire, including
material that is publicly available. Judge Alito submitted his
questionnaire to the Committee
last week.
PDF
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December 8, 2005
The Hon. Samuel A. Alito, Jr.
Frank R. Lautenberg
United States Courthouse & Post Office Building
50 Walnut Street
Newark, New Jersey
07101
Dear Judge Alito,
Thank you for your responses to
the Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire. While your
answers have been helpful to the Committee, there are some
questions that seem to have incomplete responses. In order for
the Committee to have the information it requires to thoroughly
review your record prior the hearing, please provide completed
answers as noted below, and if you know of any possible
materials responsive to the questionnaire which you are unable
to obtain, please inform the Committee where such materials may
be obtained.
Specifically, please provide
complete answers to the following questions from your
questionnaire:
Question 14 (b). In response, you
neither provided nor offered guidance as to the location or
contents of 50 Office of Legal Counsel (“OLC”) memoranda you
wrote or supervised the preparation of, as detailed in your
response to the Committee’s 1990 questionnaire. In fact, you did
not produce some publicly available material, such as the four
published OLC memoranda you authored. As requested in the
question, the Committee must have access to your entire work
product from your time as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General
in OLC.
Question 13(c). In response to
this question you provided no materials for 21 out of the 50
items listed. For example, you wrote that you were unable to
locate any materials relating to remarks you made at a
Federalist Society discussion in April of 1992 on Judicial
Activism, or at a Federalist Society workshop on the Commerce
Clause in May of the same year. Please specify, for each of the
speeches for which you were unable to provide the Committee with
documentation, what efforts you made to obtain from others’
notes, transcripts, or some record, any other efforts you made
to track down the information, or where you believe the
Committee may be able to obtain such documentation.
Question 15(f). We are aware that
you worked on at least three cases which you did not list and
for which you did you provide materials. In your 1985
application materials for a political appointment at the Justice
Department, you remarked that you were “particularly proud” of
work you had done on cases involving abortion. The National
Archives has produced a 17-page memorandum you wrote to
Solicitor General Charles Fried on the case of Thornburgh v.
American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and one
of your colleagues has been quoted telling the press that you
volunteered to help out on the case. However, you included no
information about your work on Thornburgh with the questionnaire
responses, nor any information about other cases involving
abortion which could have served as a basis for your statement
in the 1985 application. Likewise, the Archives released
memoranda you wrote while at the SG’s office on two other cases,
Tennessee v. Garner and Marsh v. Board of Education of
Flint.
Please provide information and any relevant materials, including
memoranda, concerning those cases and any others you did not
include in your initial responses.
Sincerely,
Patrick Leahy
Edward Kennedy
Joseph Biden
Herb Kohl
Dianne Feinstein
Russell Feingold
Charles Schumer
Richard Durbin
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