Lies take many forms.
Sometimes, silence communicates a lie.
If, for example, a Supreme Court nominee is asked his position on a specific issue during his Senate confirmation hearings and refuses to state his position, he is lying.
In the case of Samuel Alito, when he refused to state his requested positions, it was not that he was undecided on the matters; it was that he knew stating his positions would endanger his confirmation.
Today’s New York Times carries a front page article titled “Grass-Roots Organizers Fueled Effort to Shift Court to the Right.”
The Federalist Society, as one of the reactionary groups among the above-mentioned organizers is called, had this two-part strategy: First, praise the nonpartisan legal credentials of the nominee, steering the debate away from the nominee’s possible influence over hot-button issues. Second, attack the liberal groups they expected to oppose any Bush nominee.
These people do not organize because their main aim is to confirm a judge with outstanding legal credentials; they organize because they want to influence “hot-button issues.” They know that their extremist views on many of those issues are unpalatable to enough of their fellow citizens that those fellow citizens would very strongly object to having those views forced on them under force of law through future court decisions.
Their underhanded strategies for getting candidates they support onto the Supreme Court amount to a massive disrespect for the Constitution and the democratic process. Taking school prayer as a representative “hot-button issue:” introducing religion in a public school setting violates the separation of church and state. Any parent who wants their child to pray in the morning can figure out how to have a prayer session with their child at home. No liberal person is going to prevent them from praying in their home, and nothing is being forced upon them, as their prayer sessions are forced upon others when they take place in public schools.
Their tactics towards establishing prayer in the public schools amount to giving those who don’t want that the finger. The wider society should be flipping the bird right back at them. Instead, Democrats rolled over and played dead in the face of the Alito confirmation.