Those who have been hoping that the Supreme Court battles would provide an opportunity for a concerted debate about constitutional principles have a lot to smile over after yesterday’s nomination of Samuel Alito. Not only have Judge Alito’s 15 years riding the 3rd Circuit left him with an extensive paper trail that will be grounds for such a debate, but this nomination seems to signal that the White House is finally ready to force senators to confront issues that were obscured in both the Roberts and Miers nominations. The bold President Bush whom Americans re-elected in 2004 may be making a comeback.

One sign of the kind of confirmation process this will be came in Judge Alito’s acceptance speech yesterday morning. In a text nearly twice as long as the remarks offered by Harriet Miers and a full three times longer than those delivered by Chief Justice Roberts, Judge Alito went further than either of his predecessors in describing his judicial philosophy. “Federal judges have the duty to interpret the Constitution and the laws faithfully and fairly, to protect the constitutional rights of all Americans, and to do these things with care and with restraint, always keeping in mind the limited role that the courts play in our constitutional system,” he said.

With words like “restraint” and “limited role,” this represents the clearest out-of-the-gate statement yet of judicial philosophy from any of the president’s Supreme Court picks. Chief Justice Roberts was mute on the issue at his announcement, and Ms. Miers only referred to “the founders’ vision of the proper role of the courts in our society,” without elaborating on her understanding of that vision. Watching Judge Alito’s performance yesterday, one gained the sense that this confirmation process will be about defining the role of the judiciary and not just about accepting a generally conservative jurist with an agreeably vague record.

Senators will have reams of Judge Alito’s written words to consider. Already the conclusion he reached in one case – Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, in which he offered the most restrictive interpretation of Roe v. Wade of any of his colleagues – has ignited the passions of liberal activists. But to focus on this one case, or to focus only on what Judge Alito ruled and how, is to miss the point. Casey hinged on five restrictions on abortion that Pennsylvania lawmakers had attempted to impose. A district court struck down all of them as unconstitutional. The Appeals Court upheld four of them but ruled that the fifth, a spousal notification requirement, was unconstitutional.

Judge Alito’s controversial ruling is a partial dissent in which he argued that his colleagues should have also allowed that fifth limitation to stand. But rather than questioning the fundamental precedent set by Roe, he simply differs with his fellow judges over how to interpret the meaning of the phrase “undue burden” in a separate precedent. In Casey, Judge Alito homed in on the specific legal issue involved in a specific aspect of the case and parsed the meaning of a specific precedent to reach his conclusion. It’s a theme that emerges in many of his other “controversial” cases.

Another theme running through Judge Alito’s rulings is his belief in the importance of federalism. In 2000, he penned a decision stating that the government of Pennsylvania could not be held liable under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act, since the Eleventh Amendment’s preservation of states’ sovereign immunity precluded such a suit. First, Judge Alito resisted the temptation to interpret federal authority expansively, a temptation to which the Supreme Court gave in on a similar case a few years later. Second, he affirmed the supremacy of the legislature in one aspect of the case hinging on whether it fell to the legislature or administrative agencies to waive that immunity.

He took an even stronger stand for federalism in United States v. Rybar, in which he dissented from a ruling upholding a federal gun-control law on the grounds that the law ran afoul not of the Second Amendment but of the Commerce Clause. He wrote in that case that Congress’s mere unproven claim that a behavior affected interstate commerce was not sufficient justification to regulate an intrastate behavior and demanded proof. “If, as the government and the majority [opinion] baldly insist, the purely intrastate possession of machine guns has [a deleterious effect on interstate commerce], these steps are not too much to demand to protect our system of constitutional federalism.”

A third theme in Judge Alito’s work is his willingness to defer to other branches of government, as when he noted, in Fraise v. Terhune, that the executive – embodied in this case by prison administrators – might know better than judges how to ensure order in jails. In that majority opinion, Judge Alito criticized the dissent for being “unwilling to accord any significant deference to the judgment of the responsible New Jersey officials that the Five Percent Nation [an alleged prison gang with religious undertones] presents a security threat within the state’s correctional system.”

As we thumbed through some of Judge Alito’s rulings yesterday, we were struck by his restraint. Even when his final rulings have bucked liberal orthodoxy, as in Casey and Rybar, the difference has been in his parsing of fairly narrow questions where a more activist conservative might have grabbed an opportunity to tackle broader issues (like the constitutionality of Roe itself or gun control and the Second Amendment). Even in some of his most high-profile cases, such as the religious liberty case Richard Garnett describes nearby, his rulings have focused on close readings of precedents and careful interpretation of the facts each case presents.

This nomination, then, is good news on several fronts. If confirmed, Judge Alito will help steer the Supreme Court back toward restraint and interpretation, rather than improvisation, of the law. And, even as many quarters on the left have derided such a long and clear record as “conservative judicial activism” and vowed a fight, Mr. Bush has nominated Judge Alito anyway. Perhaps this marks a return to the courage Americans voted for when they returned President Bush to office.