SCOTUS: Compare GOP Stall On Alito And CAP With Full Disclosure On Sotomayor And PRLDEF

Remember the whole "Is he or isn’t he?" brouhaha over Alito’s membership in "Concerned Alumni for Princeton (CAP)?" 

With it’s subsequent Mrs. Alito subtle moment in the sobby spotlight during the Alito confirmation hearings? The one that Sen. Lindsey Graham conveniently engineered to bring out the bad news about CAP’s racist tendencies while attempting to make Alito look more sympathetic to the public, despite his creepy opening statement?

Because I do.

The tap dance and refuse to deliver act that the GOP put on to keep Alito’s "Concerned Alumni of Princeton" info out of the public eye was a shameless stonewall maneuver from start to finish.

Jane and I spent weeks trying to pry any substantive, on point information out of people on the Hill, as did Sen. Ted Kennedy:

And the Republicans know this CAP stuff is toxic. They’ve been stonewalling any legitimate inquiry into creepy Sam’s history with the group, and Specter is either so ignorant of what’s going on within his own committee that he’s in no position to be chairing it or he’s just a lying shill for the Bush administration when he says those documents were never requested.

Think Progress has a video of the dust-up with Ted Kennedy.

This is a history of the back-and-forth with the Kennedy office, according to Kennedy staff:

November 30, 2005: Senator Kennedy requests Congressional Research Service to ask Rusher’s permission to examine CAP documents at Library of Congress.

Week of December 5, 2005: Rusher turns down CRS request.

December 22, 2005: Senators Kennedy sends letter to Senator Specter asking for Committee request of Rusher documents. Delivered by hand to Judiciary Committee.

Date unknown prior to 1/5/06: Kennedy staff and Specter staff discuss December 22 request.

January 5, 2006, 7:29 pm: Kennedy staff request status report from Specter staff on request regarding Rusher documents.

January 5, 2006 7:50 pm: Specter staff replies that they are not inclined to grant request because they are personal documents.

January 6, 2006, 12:01 am: Kennedy staff asks Specter staff to reconsider on basis that there are not personal documents but business records of a very public organization.

January 11, 2006: Senator Specter says he’s unaware of the request.

Yep, the very model of forthcoming integrity and transparency, that was Snarlin Arlen and the GOPeevish and Sammy Alito.

The irony is that Sonia Sotomayor was just the sort of student that CAP was trying to keep out of the hallowed halls of Princeton in the first place.  And she proved them right about how it would make the place worse by graduating summa cum laude from there.  That’ll teach her for being an uppity woman.

Contrast that with the disclosures thus far from Sotomayor on the GOP’s attempt to manufacture a mountain out of a very tiny molehill, if that, of the PRLDEF.

And it gets better.  Check out this responsiveness:  There was a joint letter from Pat Leahy and Jeff Sessions to the PRLDEF on June 18, 2009 (PDF). There was a substantial document disclosure (32 documents total) from them to the full committee, all of which are posted in full online for public perusal, on June 30th.  There was a subsequent second set of disclosures (71 documents total), sent voluntarily as materials were found, on July 3rd, 2009 (Cover Letter, Document Index, Box Catalogue [PDF]).

As Sen. Pat Leahy said in a statement on Friday:

The Senate Judiciary Committee has received the response from LatinoJusticePRLDEF to the request for documents related to Sonia Sotomayor’s affiliation with the organization. The receipt of these documents is timely, and appears to be complete and responsive to the request for additional information, materials not called for in the bipartisan Committee questionnaire submitted by Judge Sotomayor. Before this request, we already had a more public and complete picture of Judge Sotomayor’s record than for previous nominees, and all relevant documents were provided by the nominee more than a month before the start of confirmation hearings. This well-respected civil rights advocacy organization has cooperated and made an extensive effort to review decades-old records, most of which have no connection to Judge Sotomayor, to provide even more information to the Committee.

Read through Sen. Ted Kennedy’s attempts to get his hands on anything substantive about CAP and contrast that with the Sotomayor response. And then tell me who is forthcoming and who was very clearly not, despite Jeff Sessions protestations at the time to the contrary.

And all the whining about needing more and more time to review documents from the GOP?  You asked for them, you make the time to read them. That’s your job. The public pays your salary.  If you cannot do your job, then perhaps it is time for the public to find someone new to elect and give you and your staff more free time to ponder the meaning of "work ethic."

Actions speak awfully loudly, don’t they, whatever the PR maneuvers and puffed up protestations to the contrary may say. And thus far, Sotomayor’s actions have tended toward transparency. Which is a big point in her favor with me at this point.