Senators of both parties said Thursday that Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., President Bush's choice for the Supreme Court, had told them he believed the court might have gone too far in separating church and state.

Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said that Thursday in a private meeting Judge Alito expressed empathy for "the impression that the court's decisions were incoherent in this area of the law in a way that really gives the impression of hostility to religious speech and religious expression."

Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, said after his own meeting with the judge that he, too, was "very satisfied" that Judge Alito had said he believed the court had erred by going too far in prohibiting government support for religion at the risk of hampering individual expression of religion.

"He indicated that people have a right, a very distinct right, to express their religious views," Mr. Byrd said.

Although the senators said Judge Alito had not told them how he would rule in specific cases, their comments were the first indication of his views concerning one of the most contentious issues before the court.

Many liberals and religious minorities view the court's jurisprudence on separation of church and state over the last 50 years as a bedrock principle of American life. But anger over the court's rulings against school prayer, government displays of the Ten Commandments and other public forms of religious expression also played a major role in the birth of a conservative Christian political movement.

Nice to see where Alito's head is on this. In fact, you can't conceivably have enough separation between the state and religion -- ask the Puritans. It really ought to be as absolute as possible, given the practical realities of conflicting interests, but the Supreme Court and the Bush administration have been chipping away at that wall for years now, and the last thing we need is more weight on the chisel.

Yet another reason that Alito should be filibustered -- and whoever is nominated after him, if they hold the same views.

Americans United has more:

During his stretch on the 3rd U.S. Circuit of Appeals, Alito issued two rulings that saved government-sponsored religious displays from constitutional challenges.

Alito also wrote the majority opinion in a case forcing a New Jersey public school district to allow Child Evangelism Fellowship to use school resources to disseminate its religious material to students. The judge also joined a dissenting opinion in a case that invalidated a public school policy permitting students to vote on whether to have prayer at graduation ceremonies. Alito would have allowed majority rule on prayer.

In 2000, the Supreme Court struck down organized prayer at public school-sponsored football games in a case called Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe., Cornyn told The Times that he discussed the Santa Fe ruling with Alito and that the judge “did commiserate with me a little bit. I hope that he will be able to give the United States Supreme Court’s ruling some coherence, because frankly they are way out of step with what the founding fathers intended.”

High court nominees are usually very reluctant to discuss specific cases during the confirmation process. That Alito did so could be a sign that he is a far-right judicial activist eager to overturn decades of settled church-state law.

These unnerving insights into Alito’s judicial thinking should give all defenders of separation of church and state pause. They only add to a growing concern that the Bush administration’s goal is to tilt the high court sharply to the right. That process could take a great leap forward with confirmation of Samuel Alito to a lifetime seat on the nation’s highest court.

As People for the American Way summed it up the other day:

Many important cases in recent years have been decided by just one or two votes, often with Justice O’Connor casting a decisive vote to uphold critical rights and liberties. Confirming additional far-right judicial activists like Samuel Alito to the Court would threaten hundreds of Supreme Court decisions that protect privacy, civil rights, religious liberty, reproductive choice, clean air and water, worker rights, consumer safety, educational opportunity, and much more.

Most churches in American realize that keeping the government and religion separate is for their benefit, since it allows the free practice of all religions without interference, and without needing to compete with a state-sponsored entity that would, inevitably, have an advantage. Unfortunately, the fundamentalist right and their Federalist Society buddies are convinced they can ride that tiger and have their religion come out on top, so they don't shy away from the fight -- in fact, they relish it.

To the extent that Alito, presumably from entirely different motivations, would help the fundies to win that fight, he's dangerous and his nomination must be stopped.