As the Senate Judiciary Committee examines the fitness of U.S. Appeals Court Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court, it would be easy to presume that civil rights groups are opposing Alito’s nomination simply because he is a conservative.

However, a careful reading of special reports compiled by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) and the Alliance for Justice shows that they have legitimate concerns about Alito’s staunch opposition to civil rights and his eagerness to limit the power Congress has to remedy racial discrimination.

“Judge Alito’s 1985 application to be the Reagan administration’s Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel reveals the beginnings of his ideology and subsequent judicial philosophy,” the LCCR report observes. “In that application, he strongly embraces the conservative ideology of the Reagan administration, singling out his work to restrict affirmative action and limit the remedies available to victims of discrimination as areas that he was ‘particularly proud.’”

The LDF report quotes Alito’s comments in more detail: “Most recently, it has been an honor and source of personal satisfaction for me to serve in the office of the Solicitor General during President Reagan’s administration and to help advance legal positions in which I personally believe very strongly. I am particularly proud of my contributions in recent cases in which the government has argued in the Supreme Court that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed.”

His opponents were not seeking quotas, which had been forbidden by the executive order creating affirmative action.

LDF discovered that, “As a lawyer in the Solicitor General’s office, Alito participated in three major affirmative action cases before the Supreme Court….he argued against court-ordered affirmative action as a remedy for violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964…against voluntary affirmative action under Title VII…and against voluntary affirmative action under the Constitution…”

In his 1985 application, LCCR noted, Alito wrote: “In college, I developed a deep interest in constitutional law, motivated in large part by disagreement with Warren Court decisions, particularly in the areas of criminal procedure, the Establishment Clause and reapportionment.”

LCRR observes, “At the time of his statement, nearly everyone accepted the legitimacy of the Warren Court’s 20-year old rulings on reapportionment – Baker v. Carr, which said for the first time, that the federal courts had a role to play in making sure that all Americans have a right to equal representation; Wesberry v. Sanders, in which the Court ruled that Congressional districts have to be roughly equal in population; and Reynolds v. Sims, in which the Court held that state legislative districts had to be equal in population, according to the principle of ‘one person, one vote.’”

On the bench, Alito dissented from the majority’s decision that a Black employee had supplied enough information for her racial discrimination case to be heard by a jury. In Bray v. Marriott Hotels, Alito favored a very narrow reading of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the section barring employment discrimination. The majority said that if Alito’s interpretation of the law had been accepted, “Title VII would be eviscerated” and that his view would “immunize an employers from the reach of Title VII” in certain circumstances.

The majority also took Alito to task for his dissent in Riley v. Taylor, a case about whether the prosecutor had used racially-motivated peremptory strikes to exclude African-Americans from a jury. LDF said Alito equated that action to the statistical oddity of five of the last six U.S. presidents being left-handed. The judges in the majority rebuked Alito, accusing him of minimizing “the history of discrimination against potential black jurors and black defendants.”

The Alliance for Justice Report noted, “University of Chicago law professor Cas Sunstein examined Judge Alito’s approximately 65 dissents on the theory that ‘when a judge bothers to dissent from a majority is a good clue to what the judge cares most about.’ What Sunstein found was ‘stunning. Nine-one percent of Alito’s dissents take positions more conservative than his colleagues on the appeals court, including colleagues appointed by Presidents Bush and Reagan…”

Clearly, Alito is to the right of right-wingers.

“Based on his history, philosophy, and performance on the bench, LCCR, along with many in the civil rights community, has concluded that Judge Samuel Alito will not bring a balanced conservatism in the mold of Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court. Instead he would bring a more hardened ideology that is outside of the judicial mainstream on a number of critical civil rights issues and that is well to the right of where most Americans stand.”