Democrats drop Alito witness

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A freelance writer who compared the Holocaust to eating meat in a 2003 column was pulled yesterday from Senate Democrats' list of witnesses who they want to testify next week against Supreme Court nominee Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr.

The move came just a day after Stephen R. Dujack was announced as a witness and hours after Senate Republicans and conservative bloggers attacked his credibility for writing that the way people treat animals was akin to Nazis' treatment of Jews.

"To those who defend the modern-day holocaust of animals by saying that animals are slaughtered for food, and give us sustenance, I remind them, the Nazis used slave labor and made 'useful products' of their victims," he wrote in the Los Angeles Times on April 16, 2003.

"There is only one little step from killing animals to creating gas chambers a la Hitler and concentration camps a la Stalin," he wrote.

Democrats had hoped Mr. Dujack, who like Judge Alito is a Princeton graduate, would highlight the judge's former membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton, a group that Mr. Dujack said "existed primarily to oppose the presence of women and minorities" at the university.

But blogs such as National Review Online and Powerlineblog.com highlighted the animal-rights column yesterday and Republicans said Democrats hurt themselves by having Mr. Dujack on their list.

"It seems like a little bit of desperation to call a witness whose only apparent expertise is in comparing meat-eaters to those who stood by during the Holocaust," said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican. "If this is the type of witness they plan to have at this hearing, it shows there's an utter dearth of serious objections to Judge Alito's record."

In an e-mailed response to The Washington Times, Mr. Dujack said he will no longer be at the hearings but plans to submit comments.

"I hope to bring to the attention of the Judiciary Committee the disturbing conclusions we can draw about Judge Alito's character by his association with Concerned Alumni of Princeton in written testimony, which I will still submit," he said.

Tracy Schmaler, a spokeswoman for Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the top Democrat on the committee, wouldn't say whether Mr. Dujack was pulled in response to the charges but said witness lists change often.

She said in addition to removing Mr. Dujack, Democrats were adding two new witnesses: Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Florida Democrat, and Theodore M. Shaw, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.

Mr. Dujack says CAP was founded in 1972, the year Judge Alito graduated, by one of his classmates and two graduates from years earlier, and attacked minority and female students as a threat to Princeton.

Judge Alito mentioned his membership in the group as a sign of his conservative credentials on a 1985 job application to work in the Reagan administration.