In fact, Alito did no such thing.

It’s not newsworthy that Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann Bomgardner, “got choked up,” as World Views characterized it, when “Senate Judiciary Democrats … grilled, insulted, and defamed” the shoo-in nominee, although it was in fact Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham who made her bawl (Alito’s spouse needs to grow a spine and understand Washington is a pit of poisonous vipers and, besides, after her husband eagerly and dutifully facilitates the ongoing evisceration of the Constitution, she likely will not shed a tear).

I wanted to break something when I learned Alito supposedly “tried… to assure Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy that he would not allow any president to violate the constitutional rights of Americans or ignore the law,” as the Burlington Free Press reports.

Actually, Alito is the poster child for allowing Bush (a dim-witted cardboard cut-out for the Straussian neocons) to violate the Constitution ad infinitum, or until it is refuse.

Sam Alito is philosophically indistinguishable from Carl Schmitt, a leading Nazi jurist. I’m not declaring this to get your attention, not as a rhetorical device.

As we know, the “Nazi Crown Jurist” Schmitt and the Machiavellian godfather of the neocons, Leo Strauss, were collaborators and naturally saw eye to eye on Hobbes’s “war of all against all” philosophy (and agreed on the necessity of a Hobbesian-like fascist state, as do Strauss’ inheritors, the neocons). “Schmitt helped Strauss obtain a Rockefeller Foundation grant to come to the United States. Strauss and Schmitt collaborated on Schmitt’s book, The Concept of the Political and on Strauss’s book on Hobbes. Strauss’s fawning letters to Schmitt continued long after the Nazis’ ascent to power,” writes Barbara Boyd. “The close relationship between Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, and the explosive revival of Schmitt’s works in the United States,” according to Boyd, was “funded by the same foundations which sponsor the Federalist Society” (current funders include the Sarah Scaife, Carthage, Koch, Olin, Bradley, Earhart, and Castle Rock foundations, according to a Right Web profile), in other words the usual suspects also funding the fascism-loving neocon foundations.

Of course, all of this would be irrelevant if not for the fact Alito is a member in good standing with the Federalist Society (and it should not be considered a coincidence four of the current nine Supremes are Federalist Society members and Alito’s confirmation will stack the deck).

In the early 1920s, Schmitt, as a professor at the University of Greifswald, wrote his infamous treatise, “Die Diktatur” (”On Dictatorship”), in which he “discussed the foundations of the newly-established Weimar Republic, emphasizing the office of the Reichspräsident. For Schmitt, a strong dictator could embody the will of the people more effectively than any legislative body, as it can be decisive, whereas parliaments inevitably involve discussion and compromise,” according to a Wikipedia write-up on Schmitt. “For Schmitt, every government capable of decisive action must include a dictatorial element within its constitution.” In a later work, Schmitt posited “an essential division between the liberal doctrine of separation of powers and what he holds to be the nature of democracy itself, the identity of the rulers and the ruled.” It is precisely the separation of powers delineated in the Constitution the Straussian neocons are currently attacking.

As Sen. Charles Schumer (D) of New York noted during Alito’s confirmation hearing, the neocon nominee “endorsed in writing a truly vast power for the presidency” when he, as an assistant to the solicitor general in the Reagan administration, “wrote that he did not question whether former Attorney General John Mitchell should have blanket immunity from lawsuits for wiretapping Americans without a warrant in the early 1970s,” as ABC News reported, a pertinent issue considering the recent revelations of the vacuum cleaner approach of NSA snooping on Americans. Of course, for the Senate Judiciary Committee and the corporate media, the fact Alito “did not question” Mitchell’s violation of the Constitution (an elusive way to say Alito doesn’t have a problem with presidents trashing the Constitution) is not much of an issue.

All of this is part and parcel of the Straussian neocon plan to stack the Supreme Court with authoritarians who will further eviscerate the Constitution and empower the American version of the office of the Reichspräsident. Sam Alito is the linchpin in this effort and, of course, his nomination is all but assured, even if a few Democrats—upset over his obvious although unarticulated opinion on abortion, a Democrat cause célèbre—decide to launch an ineffectual filibuster and delay Alito’s confirmation for a few days.

It should be obvious by now the Straussian neocons, reading the Schmittian playbook closely, are on a roll and really there is not much we, the American people—or the small number of us who pay attention—can do to stop this steaming juggernaut as it lays waste to the founding principles of this nation and, ultimately, converts a one-time constitutional republic into a technocratic dictatorship of previously unknown dimension.

Addendum

In regard to the influence of Carl Schmitt on the Straussian neocons, read Scott Horton’s The Return of Carl Schmitt. According to Horton, the neocon response to the “dilemma” of international humanitarian law is taken straight from Schmitt. Horton writes:

According to Schmitt, the norms of international law respecting armed conflict reflect the romantic illusions of an age of chivalry. They are “unrealistic” as applied to modern ideological warfare against an enemy not constrained by notions of a nation-state, adopting terrorist methods and fighting with irregular formations that hardly equate to traditional armies. (Schmitt is, of course, concerned with the Soviet Union here; he appears prepared to accept that the Geneva and Hague rules would apply on the Western Front in dealing with countries such as Britain and the United States). For Schmitt, the key to successful prosecution of warfare against such a foe is demonization. The enemy must be seen as absolute. He must be stripped of all legal rights, of whatever nature. The Executive must be free to use whatever tools he can find to fight and vanquish this foe. And conversely, the power to prosecute the war must be vested without reservation in the Executive—in the words of Reich Ministerial Director Franz Schlegelberger (eerily echoed in a brief submission by Bush Administration Solicitor General Paul D. Clement), “in time of war, the Executive is constituted the sole leader, sole legislator, sole judge”…. In Schmitt’s classic formulation: “a total war calls for a total enemy.” This is not to say that in Schmitt’s view the enemy was somehow “morally evil or aesthetically unpleasing;” it sufficed that he was “the other, the outsider, something different and alien.” These thoughts are developed throughout Schmitt’s work, but particularly in Der Begriff des Politischen (1927), Frieden oder Pazifismus (1933) and Totaler Feind, totaler Krieg, totaler Staat (1937).

Obviously, the Straussian “war” against Islam fits the Schmittian paradigm and, in order to effectively pursue this “war” against the Islamic “other,” the Constitution, with its built-in safeguards against tyranny (in particular, a separation of powers) must be jettisoned in favor of a dictatorial executive, not only “during a time of war,” as Bush insists (or his handlers tell him to insist), but permanently. Schmitt, writes Horton, “saw in the peculiarly American notion of consensus-democracy an unsustainable foolishness, and in the Jeffersonian vision of small government with a maximum space for individual freedom a threat to his peculiar Catholic values.” Likewise, the neocons, essentially students of both Strauss and Schmitt, believe our “Jeffersonian vision of small government” and Constitutional law is not only “foolish,” but a dire threat to their program of total war, conquest, and exploitation. However, instead of “Catholic values,” the core neocons adhere to Zionist values.