So during the Alito hearing today Kennedy and specter got in a little fracas over some letters that were sent around. Here is that letter in full.

December 22, 2005

The Honorable Arlen Specter

United States Senate

Washington, DC 20510

Dear Mr. Chairman:

As you know, when Judge Samuel Alito applied for his job in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Meese Justice Department in November 1985, he submitted a list of his memberships and other activities to impress Attorney General Meese and Assistant Attorney General Charles Cooper with his enthusiastic “philosophical commitment” to their particular constitutional, legal, and political point of view.

Among the organizations he listed was “Concerned Alumni of Princeton” (CAP), an organization created in 1972, the year Judge Alito graduated. The organization was described in the press at the time and in its own literature as opposed to the increasing number of women, African Americans and Hispanics at the university. The organization also published articles critical of the rights of the disabled.

Our former Senate colleague Bill Bradley, a graduate of the university in1965, initially joined the advisory board for the group’s magazine, “Prospect,” but publicly separated himself from the group in 1973, because he felt it promoted a “right wing view” rather than the “balanced view” he had been led to believe it would present. In 1975 an official report by a committee of Princeton alumni that included William Frist, now Senator Frist, concluded that CAP’s “distorted, narrow and hostile view of the University” had “misinformed and even alarmed many alumni” and “undoubtedly generated adverse national publicity.”
Continue reading Kennedy’s Letter To Specter →