Summary
A mostly liberal group's ad says Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito made a ruling "to make it easier for corporations to discriminate" and also "voted to approve the strip search of a 10-year-old girl."
As is often the case with 30-second ads, there's more to it than that.
Alito did dissent from a 1997 ruling that allowed an African-American woman to sue Marriott Corp. for discrimination because a white woman got the supervisor's job she wanted and thought she had been promised at a hotel in New Jersey. Alito agreed that the black woman may have been "treated unfairly" by her employer, but ruled that she had produced too little evidence of racial discrimination to allow her lawsuit to go forward. Marriott argued that the white woman whom they brought in for the job had more training, had worked at a larger hotel and had supervised higher-ranking employees.
Alito also objected to allowing a Pennsylvania couple to sue local police for strip-searching their daughter during a methamphetamine raid in 1998. Although no drugs were found in the raid, police argued that their warrant allowed them to search "all occupants" of the house. And while Alito said the warrant allowed the search, he made clear he disapproved the search on a personal level, expressing a "visceral dislike" for such intrusive methods.
The ad also notes, quite accurately, that as a government lawyer 20 years ago Alito wrote that the Constitution "does not protect the right to an abortion."
