In any case, the Library of Congress thereupon received a request from Ralph Neas' People for the American Way (PAW), a smelly bunch of leftists with no principles worth mentioning, to let them rummage through my files on CAP. I denied the request, in keeping with my uniform custom of refusing to give PAW the correct Eastern Standard Time.
A subsequent and more curious request to the same effect then came from the Congressional Research Service, which (as is its custom) was acting on behalf of one or more members or committees of Congress, but refused to identify them. For that reason, this request, too, was denied.
That brings us to Wednesday, Jan. 11. That morning, in the Judiciary Committee hearings on the Alito nomination, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) demanded furiously that the committee chair, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), subpoena my files on this evil organization, CAP. Specter, who had apparently not seen a letter from Kennedy to the same general effect, told him to stop trying to run the committee, but allowed that he would look into the matter.
A couple of hours later, a member of Specter's staff phoned me and requested access to the files. I granted it, promptly and cordially, and by nightfall investigators for both Specter and Kennedy were at the Library of Congress, going through the files. They stayed at it, I am told, until 2 a.m. on Jan. 12. That same morning, Chairman Specter told the committee and the world that Judge Alito's name was nowhere to be found in those files -- not even once. Score one for Kirkpatrick.
And Sen. Kennedy? In his desperate and wholly unsuccessful effort to blacken Judge Alito, he has smeared the good names of Concerned Alumni of Princeton and various of its members with false charges of racism, anti-feminism and much else.
Just one more disgrace in the long history of this famous collector of disgraces.