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Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 20:03:44 -0400 Dear Friends and Colleagues, I am attaching three articles below that describe what we might expect out of four more years of a Bush presidency. The prospects are sobering to say the least, with consequences lasting at a minimum for decades (e.g., the Supreme Court, preemptive war, and the deficit), and potentially for much longer (the environment). In this brief essay, I would like to focus on Bush's impact on the federal court system, especially the Supreme Court. By way of disclosure, I was a supporter of Ralph Nader in 2000 – although I ultimately voted for Gore by means of a vote exchange with a Gore – >Nader voter in New York (I was, and am, in a swing state – Michigan). I supported Nader for two primary reasons; first I agreed with his positions on most issues,and although I had no illusions about his prospects for victory, I wanted to urge the Democratic party into a more progressive direction. Second, I wanted to assist the Green party in their attempt to receive 5% of the national vote, thus qualifying for federal financing. Sadly, I experienced failure in both of these goals. While I had been a major supporter of Gore's father, who was my senator when I lived in Tennessee, his son failed to reach the father's progressive standards. While I certainly would have preferred Gore to Bush, I assumed that Bush would govern much like his father, from a moderate rightist position. I felt I could live with that, and put my energies into moving the Democratic party back to its governing principles. Clearly my forecast of Bush's governing style was badly in error. In my opinion, the current Bush has been the greatest presidential disaster in my lifetime (going back to FDR), and I see the potential for a second Bush term as a calamity-in-the-making. Reasonable people can still make the argument that not voting or voting for Nader will send the strongest message to the Democrats, but in my opinion the stakes are far too high to waste a vote on sending the Democrats a message. I will leave to others an assessment on Bush's potential impact on most of the major issues and will concentrate on his likely impact on the federal court system. Republican Strategy in Supreme Court Appointments For some time the clear strategy of Republican presidents has been to appoint younger and more conservative members to all federal courts. By way of illustration, the seven current members of the Supreme Court appointed by Republican presidents (for this paper henceforth called RJs) have averaged 50 years of age at the time of their appointment. By way of contrast the two Justices appointed by Democrats (DJs) have averaged 59 years of age. The current RJs have averaged 21 years on the Court; the DJs, 11 years. Justice Thomas (with Scalia, Bush's two favorite justices) was appointed at age 43, and I would assume that his appointment would be the model, both in age and judicial temperament. Given that Justices routinely serve into their 70's, we would be looking at a three-decade impact. Current Composition of the Supreme Court The current court is evenly split along conservative-progressive lines, with four members (Renquist/age 80 at the end of this year, Scalia/68, Kennedy/68 and Thomas/56) reliably conservative, and four members (Stevens/84, Souter/65, Ginsberg/71, and Breyer/67) reliably progressive. O'Connor/74 is often a swing vote. Look again at those ages, and factor in that Ginsberg (cancer), O'Connor (cancer), Stevens (cancer) and Renquist (back) have had serious medical problems. This means that the next president is likely to have a minimum of four appointments to the Supreme Court. To put it in a different perspective , imagine a Supreme Court for the next thirty years consisting of a progressive block of Souter and Breyer, and a conservative block of Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and four additional justices equivalent to Thomas/Scalia. What would then happen to Roe v. Wade, Gore v. Bush, civil liberties, the environment – you name it? It is a thought too frightening to contemplate! The Federal Judiciary While the Supreme Court is the court of last resort, please also keep in mind that the lower federal courts are also shifting mightily to the right. In a typical four-year presidency, 25% of the federal judiciary is appointed. As of 7/02, 52% of the federal judiciary had been appointed by Democrats; 48% by Republicans. It is estimated that at the end of the current term, 46% of the judiciary will have been appointed by Democrats, 54% by Republicans. If Bush wins, at the end of his second term, 34% of the judiciary will have been appointed by Democrats, 66% by Republicans. Time to move to Costa Rica! Look, John Kerry is not the ideal candidate, certainly not my ideal candidate. But the consequences of this election are so momentous, and our responsibility to future generations of Americans is so profound, that we must not only vote for Kerry, but we must actively work for his election. Any other option is courting disaster. Peace, William J. Thomson, Ph.D. ****************************************************************** ********************************************  Imagining America if George Bush Chose the Supreme Court
October 18, 2004 Abortion might be a crime in most states. Gay people could be thrown in prison for having sex in their homes. States might be free to become mini-theocracies, endorsing Christianity and using tax money to help spread the gospel. The Constitution might no longer protect inmates from being brutalized by prison guards. Family and medical leave and environmental protections could disappear. It hardly sounds like a winning platform, and of course President Bush isn't openly espousing these positions. But he did say in his last campaign that his favorite Supreme Court justices were Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, and the nominations he has made to the lower courts bear that out. Justices Scalia and Thomas are often called "conservative," but that does not begin to capture their philosophies. Both vehemently reject many of the core tenets of modern constitutional law. For years, Justices Scalia and Thomas have been lobbing their judicial Molotov cocktails from the sidelines, while the court proceeded on its moderate-conservative path. But given the ages and inclinations of the current justices, it is quite possible that if Mr. Bush is re-elected, he will get three appointments, enough to forge a new majority that would turn the extreme Scalia-Thomas worldview into the law of the land. There is every reason to believe Roe v. Wade would quickly be overturned. Mr. Bush ducked a question about his views on Roe in the third debate. But he sent his base a coded message in the second debate, with an odd reference to the Dred Scott case. Dred Scott, an 1857 decision upholding slavery, is rarely mentioned today, except in right-wing legal circles, where it is often likened to Roe. (Anti-abortion theorists say that the court refused to see blacks as human in Dred Scott and that the same thing happened to fetuses in Roe.) For more than a decade, Justices Scalia and Thomas have urged their colleagues to reverse Roe and "get out of this area, where we have no right to be." If Roe is lost, the Center for Reproductive Rights warns, there's a good chance that 30 states, home to more than 70 million women, will outlaw abortions within a year; some states may take only weeks. Criminalization will sweep well beyond the Bible Belt: Ohio could be among the first to drive young women to back-alley abortions and prosecute doctors. If Justices Scalia and Thomas become the Constitution's final arbiters, the rights of racial minorities, gay people and the poor will be rolled back considerably. Both men dissented from the Supreme Court's narrow ruling upholding the University of Michigan's affirmative-action program, and appear eager to dismantle a wide array of diversity programs. When the court struck down Texas' "Homosexual Conduct" law last year, holding that the police violated John Lawrence's right to liberty when they raided his home and arrested him for having sex there, Justices Scalia and Thomas sided with the police. They were just as indifferent to the plight of "M.L.B.," a poor mother of two from Mississippi. When her parental rights were terminated, she wanted to appeal, but Mississippi would not let her because she could not afford a court fee of $2,352.36. The Supreme Court held that she had a constitutional right to appeal. But Justices Scalia and Thomas dissented, arguing that if M.L.B. didn't have the money, her children would have to be put up for adoption. That sort of cruelty is a theme running through many Scalia-Thomas opinions. A Louisiana inmate sued after he was shackled and then punched and kicked by two prison guards while a supervisor looked on. The court ruled that the beating, which left the inmate with a swollen face, loosened teeth and a cracked dental plate, violated the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. But Justices Scalia and Thomas insisted that the Eighth Amendment was not violated by the "insignificant" harm the inmate suffered. This year, the court heard the case of a man with a court appearance in rural Tennessee who was forced to either crawl out of his wheelchair and up to the second floor or be carried up by court officers he worried would drop him. The man crawled up once, but when he refused to do it again, he was arrested. The court ruled that Tennessee violated the Americans With Disabilities Act by not providing an accessible courtroom, but Justices Scalia and Thomas said it didn't have to. A Scalia-Thomas court would dismantle the wall between church and state. Justice Thomas gave an indication of just how much in his opinion in a case upholding Ohio's school voucher program. He suggested, despite many Supreme Court rulings to the contrary, that the First Amendment prohibition on establishing a religion may not apply to the states. If it doesn't, the states could adopt particular religions, and use tax money to proselytize for them. Justices Scalia and Thomas have also argued against basic rights of criminal suspects, like the Miranda warning about the right to remain silent. President Bush claims to want judges who will apply law, not make it. But Justices Scalia and Thomas are judicial activists, eager to use the fast-expanding federalism doctrine to strike down laws that protect people's rights. Last year, they dissented from a decision upholding the Family and Medical Leave Act, which guarantees most workers up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a loved one. They said Congress did not have that power. They have expressed a desire to strike down air pollution and campaign finance laws for similar reasons. Neither President Bush nor John Kerry has said much about Supreme Court nominations, wary of any issue whose impact on undecided voters cannot be readily predicted. But voters have to think about the Supreme Court. If President Bush gets the chance to name three young justices who share the views of Justices Scalia and Thomas, it could fundamentally change America for decades. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/18/opinion/18mon3.html?ex=1099096770&ei=1&en=f182bc20cf937f4c  How They'll Reshape the Bench
By Warren Richey, Staff writer of The Christian Science MonitorDate: 10/12/2004 (WASHINGTON)The next president - whether it is George W. Bush or John Kerry - will probably have an opportunity to shift the balance of power on the US Supreme Court in a way that could hold for decades. With a long list of 5-to-4 decisions on hot-button issues like affirmative action, school vouchers, gay rights, and abortion, even a single appointment could prove decisive in some of the nation's most contentious legal disputes. So it is not surprising that special-interest groups on both the left and right are alarmed at the prospect that a justice friendly to their cause could be replaced with a hostile jurist. As a presidential campaign election issue, however, the Supreme Court has yet to emerge as a top concern of most voters. That is partly because the issue depends on three key events, none of which has occurred. There is no indication a justice will leave the court anytime soon. Thus, no replacement has been nominated. And since no replacement has been nominated, it is not possible to know whether there will be significant opposition to the nominee in the Senate. But all that could change in an instant. And if partisan squabbles over President Bush's appointments to lower courts during the past four years are any indication, the next vacancy at the US Supreme Court could plunge the White House and Senate into a bitter, high-stakes battle. While longtime court watchers acknowledge that possibility, many say the political realities of Washington may dictate a more restrained nomination scenario. "Absent some significant change in the membership of the Senate," says David Garrow, a Supreme Court historian at Emory University in Atlanta, neither of these presidential candidates has any alternative "but to nominate within a fairly narrow window of moderation." "No Republican expects Kerry to appoint a Republican, and no Democrat expects Bush to appoint a Democrat. But I think there is the expectation that if you want to get your people confirmed, they have to be judicial," says Sheldon Goldman, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "They can't be seen as advocates for the left or the right." Nominee qualities What this would mean in a Kerry administration is nominees similar to those named by President Clinton - Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Two issues would probably frame the selection of moderate Democrat nominees by Senator Kerry - support of abortion rights and an indication that the US Constitution does not include a right to same-sex marriage, analysts say. It remains unclear whether Bush would pursue a similar strategy aimed at placing Republican moderates on the high court - for example, someone similar to Sandra Day O'Connor, a Reagan appointee who has helped uphold abortion rights but who generally votes with conservatives on federalism issues. Some analysts say the focus should be on the qualities of the individual nominee, rather than on political labels. "I don't believe the only people who could get confirmed in a Senate controlled by Republicans, after all, are those whom the left is willing to describe as moderate," says Brad Berenson, a Washington lawyer and former associate White House counsel to Bush. "A conservative president is entitled to appoint a conservative justice if his nominee is well qualified and fair-minded." Mr. Berenson adds, "There are certainly plenty of conservative jurists who fall into that category." Bush has said he favors judicial candidates in the mold of Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Both are strong conservatives, and both do not recognize abortion as a fundamental right. Senate Democrats suggest any nominees resembling Justices Scalia and Thomas will be blocked. While Republican senators largely approved Justices Ginsburg (97 to 3) and Breyer (87 to 9), both of whom shared Mr. Clinton's abortion-rights outlook, it appears Senate Democrats are prepared to block any high-court nominee who they suspect may share Bush's antiabortion outlook. Thus, if Bush is reelected, the stage appears set for a showdown. Filibuster strategy Democratic leaders in the Senate have launched 10 filibusters to block Bush's nominees to federal appeals courts. The Democrats charge that the stalled nominees are conservative extremists outside the legal mainstream. The White House and Senate Republicans dispute such characterizations, saying that each nominee would win confirmation if given an up or down vote by the full Senate. The Republicans have been unable to assemble the 60 votes necessary to end the filibusters, but they aren't without options. In two instances earlier this year, the White House circumvented filibusters by using "recess appointments" - appointments that happen when Congress is not in session - to place Alabama Attorney General William Pryor and Mississippi Judge Charles Pickering on federal appeals courts. What remains unclear is whether Senate Democrats would resort to a filibuster against a Supreme Court nominee and whether the White House would respond by making a recess appointment to the high court as a means of forcing an up or down Senate floor vote. "A vacancy cannot go unfilled indefinitely. And if the Senate refuses to vote up or down on a nominee, a recess appointment may be the only option a president has," says James Swanson, a senior legal scholar at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. President Eisenhower used recess appointments to immediately place his nominees on the Supreme Court prior to Senate confirmation. All three - Earl Warren, William Brennan, and Potter Stewart - were later easily confirmed. But that was 50 years ago, and Eisenhower was acting in the interest of efficiency at the high court rather than in an attempt to bypass any Senate opponents. In the current combative atmosphere in Washington, filibusters and recess appointments could trigger a kind of nominee Armageddon. "I call this process constitutional hardball," says Mark Tushnet, a law professor at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington. "If the scenario goes through to the point of a recess appointment, I don't think we have any idea what politics after that would look like," Professor Tushnet says. "It would be politics as war. Every issue would be a to-the-death issue." Regardless of tactics and strategy, there is another factor that could play a key role in the future makeup of the high court. Sometimes it is impossible to predict how an individual will vote once he or she becomes a life-tenured justice. "Any White House ought to appreciate that a president's predictive batting average for Supreme Court nominees historically never gets above .500," says Professor Garrow. Roe. v. Wade tally Of the five justices appointed by President Reagan and the first President Bush, three - Justices O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter - voted to uphold the Roe v. Wade abortion precedent. Indeed, all but two of the Supreme Court's nine justices were appointed by Republican presidents, but the court continues to issue decisions that are neither consistently conservative nor consistently liberal. Possible picks for the high court * For George W. Bush, the buzz about potential nominees includes J. Harvie Wilkinson and Michael Luttig, both federal appeals court judges on the Fourth Circuit in Virginia; Emilio Garza, an appeals court judge on the Fifth Circuit in Texas; and Samuel Alito, a Third Circuit appeals court judge in New Jersey. Also mentioned are White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch. * For John Kerry, speculation is that he might tap Sonia Sotomayor, a Second Circuit appeals court judge in New York. Also mentioned are David Tatel and Merrick Garland, both federal appeals court judges on the D.C. Circuit in Washington; Sandra Lynch, a First Circuit appeals court judge in Boston; and Walter Dellinger, a Duke University law professor and acting solicitor general in the Clinton administration. 
Bush packs US federal courts with right-wing ideologuesBy Patrick Martin 30 June 2003 Largely shielded from public attention by the war in Iraq and its aftermath, the Bush administration is pushing ahead with plans to pack the federal judiciary with extreme right-wing nominees. It aims to consolidate a sweeping legal retrogression, shredding the gains in democratic rights made in the 1950s and 1960s in such landmark decisions as Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, the Miranda case and those cases establishing the principles of one-man, one-vote and the right of poor defendants to government-paid legal counsel. What little media attention has been given to Bush’s judicial appointments has revolved around the filibusters by Senate Democrats, which have blocked two nominees to federal appeals courts. Senate Republicans have repeatedly failed to get the 60 votes out of 100 required to halt a filibuster against the nomination of Miguel Estrada to the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the second most powerful federal court. A second filibuster has blocked the nomination of Priscilla Owen to the Fifth Circuit Court, covering Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. Estrada would be the highest-ranking Hispanic jurist in US history, although this is so only because the Republican-controlled Senate blocked three Mexican-American nominees during the Clinton administration. The nominee himself hardly has a rags-to-riches biography, coming from a wealthy Honduran family aligned with the death squad regimes that dominated Central America in the 1980s. Estrada emigrated to the United States as a young adult, enrolled at Harvard, graduated from Harvard Law School and became a US citizen. He served in the Justice Department during the Bush and Clinton administrations. The Bush White House regarded his nomination as a trial run for the eventual appointment of an extreme-right Supreme Court justice, when the next vacancy occurs. Estrada was widely described in Republican circles as the Hispanic version of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomasa nominee whose far-right ideology could be concealed because of his minority status and the absence of any written record of his political views. When questioned by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Estrada refused to give his opinions on issues such as abortion, using the same excuse as Thomas: that it would be wrong to speak publicly about issues that could come before the court in the future. The White House refused to hand over memos Estrada wrote during his years as a government lawyer, citing lawyer-client confidentiality and privacy, although its real concern was that the documents would reveal his political positions. Estrada’s refusal to answer questions was provocative and expressed a thoroughgoing contempt for democratic accountability. He declined to name a single Supreme Court decision that he disagreed with, and initially refused even to name any judges he personally admired. Priscilla Owen, a Texas Supreme Court justice, was voted down by the Senate Judiciary Committee last September, when the Democrats controlled the panel. The Bush White House resubmitted her name in January, following the November 2002 election in which the Republicans won back control of the Senate. The Judiciary Committee, now under Republican control, approved her nomination on a party-line vote. The Senate upheld the Democratic filibuster in May, when a cloture resolution won only 52 of the 60 votes required to end debate. Opposition to Owen has focused on her strenuous efforts, while on the Texas state court, to impose restrictions on abortion in defiance of the Roe v. Wade decision. At one point, she was even rebuked by a fellow justice, Alberto Gonzales, now Bush’s White House counsel, for ignoring the law and basing her rulings on her personal religious beliefs. More filibusters threatened Filibusters are threatened against several other appeals court nominees whose records are particularly reactionary. These include Carolyn Kuhl, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge, named to the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, covering nine western states, including California. Her nomination was pushed through the Judiciary Committee on a 10-9 party-line vote, despite opposition from both of her home state senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer. In the past, in accordance with long-standing political practice in the Senate, the opposition of the home state senators would have automatically killed the nomination. Kuhl worked as a Justice Department attorney in the Reagan administration, where she argued in court for the restoration of a tax exemption for Bob Jones University, the fundamentalist college in South Carolina, which at that time barred interracial dating and described Catholicism and Judaism as Satanic religions. Opponents have also cited an October 1999 decision by Kuhl to dismiss an invasion-of-privacy claim filed by Azucena Sanchez-Scott, a breast cancer patient whose doctor allowed a drug company representative to watch her physical examination while she was disrobed from the waist up. Sanchez-Scott did not object at the time, thinking that the man was another doctor brought in for consultation, but was outraged when the doctor’s receptionist told her he was a salesman. Judge Kuhl found that the cancer patient had no “reasonable expectation of privacy” during her breast examination, a ruling that was unanimously overturned by a state appellate court, citing multiple precedents. A more notorious far-right extremist is William Pryor, the Republican attorney general of Alabama, named by Bush to the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta. Pryor is a right-wing Catholic with close ties to the fundamentalist Protestant groups, based on shared hysteria over abortion. In an appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Pryor claimed that despite public statements that the Roe v. Wade decision was “the worst abomination in constitutional law and history,” which “has led to the slaughter of millions of innocent unborn children,” he would issue judicial rulings on abortion based on law and precedent, not his religious beliefs. In the course of his tenure as state attorney general, Pryor has gone to court to support posting the Ten Commandments in public buildings in Alabama, to support laws criminalizing homosexual relations, to oppose the Violence Against Women Act, and to deprive state employees of protections mandated under the Family and Medical Leave Act. Speaking to the Senate panel, Pryor declared that he knew of no case where an innocent person had been executed since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. He also confirmed that he and his wife had scheduled vacations and travel to avoid gay pride days in Alabama and at Walt Disney World, because they regarded such occasions as morally dangerous for their young daughters. Token opposition from the Democrats Senate Democrats’ posture of adamant opposition to the administration’s efforts to pack the federal courts with right-wing extremists is largely a pretense, since they have gone along with the vast majority of Bush nominees for district and appeals court slots, allowing 127 out of 129 to go throughnot counting Kuhl and Pryor, where filibusters have not yet begun. More significant than the nominees the Democrats have opposedincluding Charles Pickering, the Mississippi former segregationist who was rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee last year but has been renominated this year by Bushare the nominees they have allowed to win confirmation, many of whom are politically indistinguishable from Estrada, Owen, Kuhl or Pryor. These include:
A coup d’état in the courts But the most revealing of all these nominationsand the one that expresses most clearly the political trajectory of the Bush administrationis the report June 19 that Bush was naming Bret Kavanaugh to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the most influential circuit court, and one from which many Supreme Court nominees have emerged. Kavanaugh, now 38, is a former deputy of Kenneth Starr in the Monica Lewinsky investigation and was principal author of the 450-page quasi-pornographic report on Clinton’s sex life released by the Office of Independent Counsel in September 1998. This report became the basis of the House vote to impeach Clinton. Kavanaugh has been a deputy White House counsel since Bush assumed the presidency. The Starr investigation was a central focus of the far-right campaign to delegitimize and subvert the Clinton administration, using methods of back-room conspiracy and political provocation to overturn the results of two presidential elections. This drive to carry out a political coup d’état was blocked in the Senate trial of Clinton, which failed to convict and remove the president. However, the Republican coup was consummated in the 2000 presidential election, which was hijacked by the Republicans after their candidate lost the popular vote, thanks to the intervention of the Republican majority on the US Supreme Court. Now the wheel comes full circle, with the Republican president, installed in office by right-wing judges, naming one of Kenneth Starr’s hatchet men to one of the highest judicial positions in the land. The takeover of all branches of the federal government by the extreme right is now virtually complete. Even the Washington Post, which has supported the vast majority of Bush’s judicial nominations and editorialized against the Estrada filibuster, was compelled to comment on the provocative character of this selection: “Kavanaugh’s nomination would suggest Bush is spoiling for a fight with Senate Democrats.” By provoking a series of filibusters over lower-level judicial appointments, the White House is testing out the opposition it may encounter in the event of a much-rumored vacancy on the Supreme Court, when one or two justices retire from the five-member bloc that placed Bush in the White House. Already, in response to the limited opposition from the Democrats, Bush and Republican congressional leaders have suggested sweeping changes in Senate rules that would essentially do away with filibusters. This would make it possible for the Republicans to use their narrow 51-49 majority in the upper house to confirm an extreme-right nominee to the Supreme Court modeled on Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas, whom Bush described as his favorite justices during the 2000 campaign. Such a rules change, however, would itself require a two-thirds majority, even more than the 60 votes required to end a filibuster. The alternative, widely discussed in official circles, is that the Senate’s presiding officer, Vice President Dick Cheney, seek a ruling from the Senate parliamentarian that filibusters are permitted only on legislation, not nominations. Both Republicans and Democrats have characterized this as the “nuclear option,” recognizing that it would amount to an unprecedented assertion of executive power, and could trigger a breakdown in the functioning of the Senate. Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat from New York, warned, “When you go nuclear, it’s bad for everyone. You vaporize every bridge, every bipartisan bridge or every other bridge, in sight.” Senate Minority Leader Thomas Daschle complained that Republicans were insisting on a success rate of 100 percent in the confirmation of judicial nominees, instead of the current rate of 98 percent. “If that doesn’t make us a rubber stamp, I don’t know what does,” he told a press conference. Daschle and the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, wrote to the White House appealing for Bush to consult with Democrats in the event of a Supreme Court vacancy, in order to avoid “a divisive confirmation fight.” This groveling only provoked an arrogant rejection by the White House, with press secretary Ari Fleischer dismissing the suggestion as “a novel new approach to how the Constitution guides the appointment process.” The Democratic Party has demonstrated repeatedly over the last decadefrom impeachment to the 2000 elections to the post-9/11 drive to create the legal framework for a police statethat it has no stomach for a fight against the creeping right-wing seizure of power in Washington. There is no significant constituency in any section of the ruling elite, liberal or conservative, for the defense of basic democratic rights. Nonetheless, so massive is the buildup of unresolved social, economic and political tensions within American society that a Supreme Court vacancy, especially in the event of a Senate filibuster, could well produce a major political and constitutional crisis in the United States. ******************************************** |