Yesterday was Judge Samuel A. Alito's first day in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Here are some of the things he believes:

• He now believes that the Constitution protects a right to privacy, even though he said the opposite in a 1985 memo he wrote while he worked for the Reagan Justice Department.
• He said he thought that Robert Bork was the best judicial nominee of this century, though he now maintains that he was just reciting the Reagan administration line. (Bork is one of the proponents of the philosophy of "originalism," which maintains that the Constitution does not change and that we can know the Founding Fathers' intentions in interpreting the Constitution.)
• He does not believe that the president is above the law.
• After being thoroughly pressed, Alito admitted that he could not think of a case in which an enemy combatant or prisoner of war had been allowed to sue the government holding him. This is relevant to the recent Padilla cases, in which Jose Padilla -- a U.S. citizen was arrested as an "enemy combatant," held in a military prison, and denied habeas corpus. Padilla demanded the right to habeas corpus (that is, the right to be charged with a crime rather than being held indefinitely without being charged) and demanded the right to challenge their status as "enemy combatants." The Justice Department has argued that Congress gave the president the power to detain U.S. citizens indefinitely as part of his need to fight the War on Terr'. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the president did not have the authority to detain U.S. citizens indefinitely.

Alito has some tough questions to answer. While John Roberts could safely say that his anti-abortion statements were twenty years behind him, Alito has no such refuge, though he has tried to suggest that his anti-abortion statements were due to the fact that he was trying to get a job in the Reagan Justice Department. While a Third Circuit Court judge in 1992, Alito wrote a dissenting opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey that wives should be required to notify their husbands of their plans to have an abortion.

Much of Alito's grilling will continue to consist of asking him why his opinions have changed, and whether or not he changed his opinion out of convenience, or because he truly changed his mind.