Bush Court: Be Afraid, Very Afraid

Democrats haven't made much of what would happen to the courts should Bush win a second term. This is curious, because you'll remember that the Gore campaign was virtually tattooed with the slogan "Two words: Supreme Court." Maybe the undecideds of Ohio don't know the President nominates judges, and nobody wants to tell them. After all, when you have a system in which the voters who matter most are the ones who know the least, care the least and pay the least attention, you're taking a risk if you give them too much information at once. They might explode! The conventional wisdom is that only college-educated liberals care about the courts, and they're already on board, but I wonder how true that is. What about those soccer moms, torn between tax cuts and abortion rights, or Arizona's Republican women, who are beginning to revolt against their party's hard-right turn, as Salon's Sidney Blumenthal recently reported? And is it wise to assume that everyone who cares already knows? A friend of mine recently met a Yale senior who supported Kerry, but not enough to register to vote; when she pointed out that Bush would have four years to pack the courts, the young genius acknowledged that this thought had never occurred to him.

The truth is, there is hardly an area of life that will not be affected by the judicial appointments made in the coming years. Will the courts continue to dismantle your right to sue state governments in federal courts? By 5 to 4, the Supreme Court decided that federal protections against age discrimination don't apply to state workers. (More recently it upheld the Americans with Disabilities Act – insofar as it applied to the right of citizens not to have to crawl up the courthouse steps.) On the same states' rights theory, by 5 to 4 it threw out parts of the Violence Against Women Act. The Patriot Act? Immigrants' rights? The environment? Ballot issues, à la Florida? Whom do you want in charge of choosing the men and women who will decide the big questions sure to arise?
Right-wing legal activist Clint Bolick has said, "This election could be a twofer – we win the White House and the Supreme Court." Let's make it a twofer for civil liberties, civil rights – and counting every vote.
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