High court Justice Alito assured Kennedy on abortion rights: NY Times

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion this summer overturning the abortion rights case Roe v. Wade, assured the late Sen. Ted Kennedy in 2005 that he considered a key legal basis for Roe to be “settled,” a new report reveals.

“I am a believer in precedents,” the conservative Alito told Kennedy, the liberal Massachusetts Democratic senator wrote in his diary in November 2005, The New York Times reported.

“I believe that there is a right to privacy. I think it’s settled as part of the liberty clause of the 14th Amendment and the Fifth Amendment,” Alito said, according to the Kennedy diary.

“So I recognize there is a right to privacy. I’m a believer in precedents. I think on the Roe case that’s about as far as I can go,” Alito said to Kennedy, a staunch defendant of abortion rights who died in 2009.

The comment was made as Alito was seeking Senate confirmation to the Supreme Court, during a visit to Kennedy’s office, wrote John Farrell in The Times. Farrell’s new book, “Ted Kennedy: A Life,” which features details of the diary entries, is being published Tuesday.

The 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe established for the first time that there was a federal constitutional right to abortion.

Roe was based on a prior high court decision, Griswold v. Connecticut, which in 1965 found that there was a constitutional right to marital privacy, in a case related to married couples having been barred from using birth control.

Conservatives for decades attacked Roe as flawed, in part with the argument that the Constitution does not explicitly state individuals have a right to privacy, much less one to abortion.

During his meeting with Alito, Kennedy was skeptical of the judge, who as a lawyer in the Justice Department during the Reagan administration had written a memo in 1985 that noted he opposed Roe.

“Judge Alito assured Mr. Kennedy that he should not put much stock in the memo,” The Times reported.

“He had been seeking a promotion and wrote what he thought his bosses wanted to hear. ‘I was a younger person,’ Judge Alito said. ‘I’ve matured a lot.’ “

Alito also said that his views on Roe being erroneously decided were “personal,” according to Kennedy’s diary.

“Those are personal,” Alito said, Kennedy wrote in the diary. “But I’ve got constitutional responsibilities and those are going to be the determining views.”

Despite that assurance, Kennedy voted against confirming Alito to the Supreme Court.

Alito didn’t return a request submitted to the Supreme Court’s…