Yahoo reports:

WASHINGTON - Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito turned aside Democratic attacks on his judicial record and credibility at contentious confirmation hearings Wednesday that left his wife in tears. …

Under persistent questioning, Alito also declined for a second straight day to say whether he believes, as he did in 1985, that the Constitution contains no right to an abortion. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to speak about issues that could realistically come up” before the courts, he said.

Alito, 55, was unflappable for hours on end in marathon questioning before the Senate Judiciary Committee. But his wife, Martha-Ann Bomgardner, grew emotional near the end of the day and left the hearing room weeping.

Update: More on this here.

While the judicial interrogation also included insinuations that Alito might be a racist, or a sexist, or a homophobe, most of us would agree that the main issue here is abortion and specifically how Alito feels regarding Roe vs. Wade.

I ask specifically my liberal readers, is all of this really worth it? What message do you think this sends to other potential judicial nominees? Don’t you agree that this will do alot to discourage them from even accepting what used to be an honor and duty to work as a federal judge? What do you think this does to the whole judicial process itself, and more importantly, to the future of this country?

Before answering this, it is important to remind yourself that, as I have said repeatedly before, overturning Roe vs. Wade will NOT OUTLAW ABORTION, all it would do is kick the issue back to the States where each individual State can decide the issue on its own terms, something that may even have no effect on the actual number of abortions anyway.

It is also important to remember that a reasonable non-partisan judge can disagree with Roe Vs. Wade. That ruling has its critics on both sides of the political aisle and is in no way one of the Supreme Courts stronger cases.

Isn’t it better to just let Roe vs. Wade die and allow this contentious issue to be decided by the voters instead of the courts? Is what has become of the judiciary really worth Roe?

It is times like this where Supreme Court justice Scalia’s words become almost prophetic,

“The worst thing about the Living Constitution is that it will destroy the Constitution. You heard in the introduction that I was confirmed, close to 19 years ago now, by a vote of 98 to nothing. The two missing were Barry Goldwater and Jake Garnes, so make it 100. I was known at that time to be, in my political and social views, fairly conservative. But still, I was known to be a good lawyer, an honest man — somebody who could read a text and give it its fair meaning — had judicial impartiality and so forth. And so I was unanimously confirmed. Today, barely 20 years later, it is difficult to get someone confirmed to the Court of Appeals. What has happened? The American people have figured out what is going on. If we are selecting lawyers, if we are selecting people to read a text and give it the fair meaning it had when it was adopted, yes, the most important thing to do is to get a good lawyer. If on the other hand, we’re picking people to draw out of their own conscience and experience a new constitution with all sorts of new values to govern our society, then we should not look principally for good lawyers. We should look principally for people who agree with us, the majority, as to whether there ought to be this right, that right and the other right. We want to pick people that would write the new constitution that we would want.

And that is why you hear in the discourse on this subject, people talking about moderate, we want moderate judges. What is a moderate interpretation of the text? Halfway between what it really means and what you’d like it to mean? There is no such thing as a moderate interpretation of the text. Would you ask a lawyer, “Draw me a moderate contract?” The only way the word has any meaning is if you are looking for someone to write a law, to write a constitution, rather than to interpret one. The moderate judge is the one who will devise the new constitution that most people would approve of. So, for example, we had a suicide case some terms ago, and the Court refused to hold that there is a constitutional right to assisted suicide. We said, “We’re not yet ready to say that. Stay tuned, in a few years, the time may come, but we’re not yet ready.” And that was a moderate decision, because I think most people would not want — if we had gone, looked into that and created a national right to assisted suicide, that would have been an immoderate and extremist decision.

I think the very terminology suggests where we have arrived — at the point of selecting people to write a constitution, rather than people to give us the fair meaning of one that has been democratically adopted. And when that happens, when the Senate interrogates nominees to the Supreme Court, or to the lower courts — you know, “Judge so-and-so, do you think there is a right to this in the Constitution? You don’t? Well, my constituents think there ought to be, and I’m not going to appoint to the court someone who is not going to find that” — when we are in that mode, you realize, we have rendered the Constitution useless, because the Constitution will mean what the majority wants it to mean. The senators are representing the majority, and they will be selecting justices who will devise a constitution that the majority wants. And that, of course, deprives the Constitution of its principle utility. The Bill of Rights is devised to protect you and me against, who do you think? The majority. My most important function on the Supreme Court is to tell the majority to take a walk. And the notion that the justices ought to be selected because of the positions that they will take, that are favored by the majority, is a recipe for destruction of what we have had for 200 years”.

Update: The Wall Street Journal has more.