That’s the title of my new Confirmation Tales post, which discusses a very interesting job application of sorts that was among the records that the White House provided to the Senate on Samuel Alito’s nomination. An excerpt:
“I am and always have been a conservative.” So began the 500-word essay (pp. 16-17 here) that Samuel Alito submitted to the White House’s Office of Presidential Personnel on November 15, 1985.
Three days earlier, the Senate had confirmed Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Charles J. Cooper to head the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel—the same prestigious position that William H. Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia had once held. Cooper would be Attorney General Edwin Meese’s top lawyer. He ardently wanted Alito to be his deputy.
Over the previous four years, Cooper had come to know Alito well and to admire his brilliant legal mind. Cooper had been chief lieutenant during those years to William Bradford Reynolds, the assistant attorney general for civil rights. Alito had been a line lawyer in the Office of the Solicitor General, briefing and arguing Supreme Court cases as an assistant to Ronald Reagan’s first Solicitor General, Rex E. Lee.
Deputy positions in the Department of Justice—positions one level below Senate-confirmed officials—are formally filled by the Attorney General. But the White House’s Office of Presidential Personnel (OPP) vets all proposed deputies, as well as candidates for other non-career (“political”) positions throughout the administration, to ensure that they are supportive of the president.
For the eight years since he finished a judicial clerkship in 1977, Alito had been a career lawyer in the Department of Justice: four years as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey, then four years as an assistant Solicitor General. There was nothing in his résumé to indicate that he was a Reagan conservative. What’s more, the Solicitor General’s office had become notorious within the Reagan White House as a bastion of opposition to conservative legal principles. So Alito had to prove his bona fides to OPP.
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