The hour of indictment.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editor's Note

We had a fun indictment party on October 28. We ordered out for pizza, and then we gathered in our little conference room to watch special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald hold forth on his indictment of I. Lewis Libby.

After five years of one of the most arrogant and lawless Administrations in the nation's history, at last an ounce of accountability.

There ought to be more. The Vice President, as we discuss in the Comment section, is deeply implicated in the Libby indictment. And far from coming clean, Cheney has praised Libby and promoted others from his staff whose hands are dirty. The Vice President acts as though he is above the law. Fitzgerald (or the House, if it had any integrity) should notify him that he's not.

When the far right forced Harriet Miers to withdraw her nomination to the Supreme Court, I knew it was trouble. Miers took herself out not because she flunked the Con Law exam that Senator Arlen Specter was administering but because she flunked the loyalty oath that the anti-abortion zealots were administering.

Bush then bowed to their blackmail and traded a crony for a Cro-Magnon conservative in Judge Samuel Alito.

While on the Third Circuit, Alito dissented in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Alone among the three-judge panel, he argued that it's OK to force a woman to get her husband's approval before she is allowed to have an abortion. That put him at odds with the Supreme Court he hopes to join, since the Court ruled in Casey: "Women do not lose their constitutionally protected liberty when they marry."

Alito has also been hostile to privacy rights and stingy when it comes to allowing people to seek asylum or to sue for racial or gender or disability discrimination.

In one case (Doe vs. Groody), he dissented from a decision by the Third Circuit, which had ruled in favor of a mother and her ten-year-old daughter who...