Alito fulfills expectations on both sides

WASHINGTON — In his 15 months on the Supreme Court, Justice Samuel Alito has been everything his conservative supporters expected and his liberal detractors feared.

The newest justice has been a reliable vote in favor of the death penalty, expanded police powers and restrictions on abortion.

Alito has yet to write an opinion on a major constitutional issue, not uncommon for someone so new to the court. And he has been more measured than Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, declining to join their call to overturn the court's landmark Roe v. Wade decision on abortion, for instance.

"He has been as advertised, not someone who wanted to dramatically change the law or had a fixed vision of the Constitution," said Thomas Goldstein, a lawyer who argues before the court and tracks voting trends. "But he has moved the court a significant step to the right."

Alito has voted with Chief Justice John Roberts, Scalia and Thomas in every case in which the court has been ideologically divided.

When they've been joined by Justice Anthony Kennedy, they've had a majority to uphold the first nationwide ban on an abortion procedure, to reinstate death sentences in California and Kansas and to give police more freedom to barge into homes and seize evidence.

Conversely, lacking Kennedy's vote, Alito has been among the dissenters in the court's first case on global warming and challenges to death sentences in Texas.

On the court's liberal side, Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and John Paul Stevens have similarly voted together in those cases.

Still to come this term are major decisions that also may well fall along the same lines, involving voluntary school integration plans in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle, and corporate- and union-sponsored political advertising shortly before elections.

As the replacement for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who often found herself in the center of the court's ideological divide, Alito has managed to shift the court's view on some of the most contentious recurring issues before it. Roberts, no less conservative than Alito, took Chief Justice William Rehnquist's seat and has generally voted the same as his predecessor.

Alito's position in the court's biggest cases has been a source of frustration to Senate Democrats and interest groups. They could not muster the votes to block his confirmation after trying to demonstrate the depth of his conservatism when he was in the Reagan administration Justice Department and a judge on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.