If you are looking for the opinions of Professor Ronald D. Rotunda of George Mason University, Professor Geoffrey C. Hazard of University of Pennsylvania and Professor Thomas D. Morgan of George Washington University knocking down the Vanguard conflict of interest assault on Alito, there you go.

More at Blogs for Bush, Political Teen, Flip and Decision 08. The big question the Democrats seem to be all over is not really “should he have recused himself” but “did he tell the Senate he would and then didn’t?” Both Bainbridge and Hawkins asked about this on the Gillespie conference call today, and the concensus is that the question was sidestepped. I still have yet to find his original questionaire from 1990 to see what he actually said. The confirmation hearing itself was pretty much a non-event, with just a few questions from Kennedy, if my recollection of previous reading is correct.

UPDATE: Alito responds. Here’s the WaPo story.

“To the best of my knowledge, I have not ruled on a case for which I had a legal or ethical obligation to recuse myself during my 15 years on the federal bench,” he wrote.

Alito’s letter added a second defense that the White House had not pressed earlier. The 1990 Senate questionnaire dealt with possible conflicts during his “initial service” on the appellate court, Alito noted. “I respectfully submit that it was not inconsistent with my questionnaire response for me to participate in two isolated cases seven and thirteen years later,” he wrote.

And Captain Ed, too, would like to read the original context of the response, but says as scandals go, there’s not much here.

For my part, I don’t find the argument at all compelling. Mutual fund management, as a number of arguments attest, does not equal a material interest in the broker who arranged the sale. I wish I could read the questionnaire itself to see the context in which Alito’s alleged promise of recusal came; rarely do jurists promise to recuse in absolute terms for a hypothetical situation. I agree that issues of recusal in specific cases such as Vanguard should get discussed and debated in the Judiciary Committee with a nominee as it goes to judicial judgment and temperament. The bottom line for me is whether Alito has a pattern of operating from a conflict of interest and if any evidence shows that these skew his court rulings. Clearly in this instance, as his rulings were upheld after his later recusal, this conflict did not.

If this is the biggest point of opposition on Alito, his confirmation certainly seems assured.