Alito, for his part, says he doesn't remember joining the group and that the ROTC question must have been what prompted him to do so. He denounced as wholly unacceptable the statements on women and minorities, and dozens who know him — liberals as well as conservatives — described him both outside and in the hearings as a thoroughly decent human being without a bigoted bone in his body. You figure his wife at one point ran from the hearing room in tears, not because the inexcusable accusations as reviewed by a Republican senator struck her as true, but because she knew how terribly unfair and vicious the attack was.

Concerning abortion, Alito refused to say that the Roe v. Wade decision was settled law in the sense that it should never be re-examined. Yes, it has been around for more than 30 years now, but, as was pointed out in the hearing, the Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of "separate but equal" had been around for 58 years before being overturned in Brown v. Board of Education. It is noted that some of the nation's most highly regarded constitutional experts have said of Roe that there is nothing there; the court in its ruling made no particularly convincing argument that the right it was asserting could be justified by the Constitution. If it were overturned, it has also been argued, most states would likely make few adjustments in their laws, and most of those adjustments would likely have to do with new restrictions only when the fetus is capable of living outside the womb.

Alito said as much as he needed to. His remarks demonstrated he is not convinced Roe is of the same stature as, say, the Brown decision requiring integration of public schools, but neither is he signaling that he is on the warpath to destroy Roe. His temperament, in other words, is judicious, prudent, restrained — what you want in a judge. The worst of his Democratic inquisitors, on the other hand, were absolutist, mean-spirited and underhanded — not what you want in senators.

At some point, Alito should have quoted Christopher Marlowe, just to see if he could get Kennedy to ask how Marlowe stood on a woman's right to abortion.