Senators say Alito likely to get nod

WASHINGTON -- The battle over Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. moved yesterday from a Senate hearing room to the nation's airwaves, with liberal groups launching an ad campaign in a last-ditch attempt to convince the public that Alito shouldn't rise to the nation's highest court.

Still, senators from both parties said yesterday that Alito's confirmation is virtually certain, given the Republican majority in the Senate and the apparent failure by Democrats to raise any significant obstacles during this week's hearings.

Alito, a veteran federal appeals judge, should get the votes of nearly all of the Senate's 55 Republicans; though a Democratic filibuster is still possible, it probably won't happen, according to senators and aides.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who has indicated he will vote against Alito, said in an interview that he's ''not sure" Democrats were able to plant enough seeds of doubt in the confirmation hearings to stop him from being confirmed. He said Alito was disciplined, careful to separate himself from controversial statements he made in the past, and purposely vague about his views to avoid controversy.

''The nominee was extremely well briefed and very well schooled," said Kennedy, a Democrat and the most senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. ''He was very clever. He left [his positions on key issues] officially up in the air to try and soften any kind of opposition."

Democrats yesterday served notice: They will try to delay the committee vote on Alito until at least Thursday and possibly into the following week. They'll use that time to come up with a strategy about how to handle the nomination, and gauge whether the ad wars sway public opinion against the nomination.

But Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Judiciary Committee and a GOP moderate who liberal groups had hoped would oppose Alito, said the delay won't affect the nomination.

''I don't think there is any life in it as a political issue," said Specter. ''I think we know how the vote in committee is going to come out, and we ought to go to the floor and debate it on the floor."

In another setback for Alito's critics, three other Republican senators who support abortion rights announced they would not join a filibuster of the nomination, although they haven't announced how they will vote.

Those senators -- Lincoln D. Chafee of Rhode Island and Olympia J. Snowe and Susan M. Collins, both of Maine -- are under pressure from both sides in the advertising and lobbying pushes.

Despite the long odds, liberal groups remained optimistic. They predicted their advertising and grass-roots campaigns would persuade some Republicans to join Democrats to vote against Alito.

''We've just begun to fight," said Ralph G. Neas, president of the liberal group People for the American Way. ''This will be a close vote in committee. It will be a close vote on the Senate floor."

Neas's group is part of a liberal coalition that began airing ads on cable and broadcast stations nationwide, minutes after the hearings ended yesterday. An ad quotes Alito's testimony during the hearings that he would be ''the same person that I was on the court of appeals."

''That's the problem," the screen reads. The ad then quotes a New York Times editorial published Thursday: Alito ''has given the American people reasons to be worried -- and senators reasons to oppose his nomination."

The coalition's leaders declined to say how much was being spent on the ads. They said they were thinking of airing ads with different themes in the coming days, trying to build public opposition against Alito.

Conservative groups immediately responded with an ad of their own, based on Democrats who have endorsed Alito's nomination. The ad is airing on national cable stations, and officials with the Progress for America Voter Fund said the price tag is $250,000.

''I'm a very liberal Democrat, and Sam's qualifications to serve on the Supreme Court are unassailable," J. L. Pottenger Jr., a Yale University law professor, says in the ad. Pottenger, who has known Alito since they were undergraduates at Princeton University, says in the ad that his schoolmate ''understands that a judge is not a policy maker. I resent the political partisan attacks on Sam Alito."

Among Democrats, opposition to Alito appears stronger than it was for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who received 78 of 100 votes for confirmation on the Senate floor. Although three of the Judiciary Committee's eight Democrats supported Roberts, all eight appear ready to oppose Alito.

Kennedy said the arguments that persuaded his colleagues on the committee to vote no could apply to all the Senate's Democrats, once the rest of the party's senators study the issues at stake and Alito's answers.

''You cannot come away without recognizing [Alito's] hostility to the average American and the favoring of the powerful," Kennedy said. ''People know we're only going to get this chance once. This nominee is the one whose impact is going to be on this generation and the following generation."

Because his three days of testimony concluded Thursday, Alito skipped the final day of the confirmation hearings yesterday. Even some committee members left early for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend.

Those who stayed heard Democrats' witnesses testify that if Alito becomes a Supreme Court justice, he would vote to overturn abortion rights and defer too much to presidential authority. Kate Michelman, a former longtime president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, told the committee that Alito's views are ''clearly a danger to the constitutional and fundamental rights of the American people."

''There's no sense in Judge Alito's writing or rulings that suggest that privacy is a fundamental right," Michelman said. ''It is very clear that he will move the court in a very different and dangerous direction for women's rights."

Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, said he believes Alito is unlikely to overturn Roe v. Wade directly. Instead, he said, Alito probably would vote to uphold restrictions to abortion rights that could leave Roe essentially meaningless.

''With the vote of Judge Alito as Justice Alito, the court will cut back on Roe v. Wade, step by step, not just to the point where -- as the moderate American center has it -- abortion is cautiously restricted, but to the point where the fundamental underlying right to liberty becomes a hollow shell," Tribe said.

But one of Tribe's Harvard colleagues, professor Charles Fried, said Alito's stated respect for precedents means he is likely to rule in accordance with the framework established by the Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision. That case said that restrictions on abortion cannot constitute an ''undue burden" on the right to abortion.

''We do not know what the future holds, but I don't expect him to do things which would be other than in the reasonable tradition of Casey," said Fried, who was Alito's boss as President Reagan's solicitor general.

At a news conference yesterday, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales urged the Senate to confirm Alito promptly, and praised him, saying he had fully answered lawmakers' questions over a grueling three days.

''Here's someone who's demonstrated that he understands the law," Gonzales said. ''He's committed to follow the law. He's demonstrated in his hearings a mastery of constitutional principles. And for all these reasons, we believe that he's worthy of a confirmation vote in an expeditious manner."

Charlie Savage of the Globe staff contributed to this report.