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Will backlash help Alito?

Will Mrs. Alito’s tearful exit create a backlash against Democratic foes of Samuel Alito?

Will the use of Alito’s membership in the Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP) help rather than hurt the nominee?

When Sen. Ted Kennedy read into the record yesterday a few inflammatory, anti-gay, and bigoted statements from articles published in the CAP magazine, he gave Alito the chance to disavow those statements, but he also implied that Alito should have known that CAP published a magazine which printed such incendiary things.

“I do not recall knowing any of these things about the organization,” Alito told Kennedy. “And many of the things that you've mentioned are things that I have always stood against.”

During a 15-minute break later in the day, after Mrs. Alito had left in tears, Sen. John Cornyn, the Texas Republican, gave reporters his assessment of the episode, “People are human; they can only take so much.”

He said the emotional price a nominee’s family pays if he is accused of associating with bigots is too high.

But Alito’s adversaries suggest that he and his handlers have something to hide and that his testimony that he did not recall anything about CAP -- other than once having been a member -- may have been less than the whole truth.

That’s why Kennedy demanded a search of CAP documents in the papers of conservative publisher and CAP founder William Rusher at the Library of Congress. (Read a Q&A with Rusher published yesterday on the National Review's web site)

“I don’t understand why those that are in charge of the nominee are attempting to hide,” Kennedy said Wednesday. “What is there in that information that they are so concerned about?”

We’ll find out today if that search of the Rusher papers turned up a “smoking gun” proving that Alito was more involved in CAP than he said he was.

Alito had listed CAP on his 1985 job application to become deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan Justice Department. But his foes argue that CAP was such a reprehensible group that Alito naturally would want to minimize his involvement with it now.

“Here he is disavowing all the positions of this group – because some of them are pretty outrageous – yet at the time someone thought it was a pretty good idea to include it on his application to improve his credentials,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., in a post-hearing briefing with reporters last night. “Why was this considered to be a good organization to put on your résumé for the Reagan administration? That’s the point people don’t want to face.”

Alito says the only reason he can recall for having been a CAP member was his concern that ROTC was not welcomed on the Princeton campus. (Read a November article in DailyPrincetonian.com regarding Alito's relationship with the group Concerned Alumni of Princeton.)

Read more from Tom Curry

So, what was in those CAP papers?

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