On top of Matt’s post, I’ll note that Philip Alito is not the first son of a Supreme Court justice to work for a Senate committee. Thurgood Marshall Jr. held several Senate staff positions in the 1980s (and perhaps very early 1990s). Those including serving as counsel to Senator Teddy Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee. (A tweet by Orin Kerr reminded me of this fact.) During those years, Kennedy was, of course, among the most vociferous of opponents to the judicial nominations made by Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
Gee, I wonder if Norm Ornstein ever raised concerns about the supposed partisan risk in the younger Marshall’s working for Kennedy as a staffer on a committee charged with reviewing Supreme Court and other judicial nominations. (Marshall himself, I gather, might not have worked on judicial nominations, just as Philip Alito, working on a committee without any jurisdiction over those nominations, surely won’t.) I wonder if Ornstein ever fretted that Justice Thurgood Marshall’s “consistently partisan” approach to judging meant that his son’s service as a staffer somehow was “just another little chink out of the court’s armor” (whatever that is supposed to mean).