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Schumer: Samuel Alito Like Rosa Parks

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Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) sloppily tied together Monday’s current events by comparing the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito to the Washington honors bestowed upon late civil rights leader Rosa Parks.

Schumer said "Alito, like Rosa Parks, can make history simply by virtue of where he sits.”

Alito was nominated Monday by President Bush to replace retiring Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court. Alito’s selection follows by a few days the withdrawn nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers.

Parks – who died last week - was arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. She was remembered by thousands of mourners this weekend in the nation's capital and in Montgomery, Ala., for her defiant act that inspired the civil rights movement.

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  Schumer, who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee, praised Parks for her civil rights courage while using that same courage and legacy as a slap at Alito.

"Will Alito, like Rosa Parks, use his seat to change the course of history for the better, or will he return it to the injustice of the past?” Schumer asked.

"It’s sad that the president felt that he had to pick a nominee likely to divide America, instead of picking a nominee like Sandra Day O’Connor that had united America,” Schumer said.

Unlike with the Miers nomination Oct. 3, President Bush's conservative base appears happy with the nomination of Alito – especially after hearing how much it seems to bother Schumer, [Senate Minority Leader] Harry Reid, Sen. Ted Kennedy and other prominent Senate liberal Democrats.

As Rush Limbaugh has said repeatedly – today with regard to Alito, and last week with regard to the Miers withdrawal – "… conservatives are never stronger than when we are advancing our principles.”

That, may be a more appropriate analogy to Rosa Parks.

Editor's note:
Rush Limbaugh Says the War for the Court Has Begun! Find Out Details – Click Here Now
Find out how the Supreme Court is destroying America – Click Here

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