I’d LIKE to think a future Supreme Court would overturn Roe Vs. Wade, but unfortunately, I don’t see any likelihood of that happening, for several reasons.
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George W. Bush just isn’t THAT conservative or that tight with the religious right. He pays them all the requisite lip service, but nothing in his record or background indicates to me that he’ll be consulting with Pat Robertson before he makes important appointments.
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George tends to choose people for high positions based on their personal compatibility with and loyalty to HIM, not to any political philosophy. My guess is, he’ll appoint people he likes and feels comfortable with to the Cabinet and to the Court. And those people may or may not toe the Christian Coalition line.
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SOME of the justices that the next President will replace are conservatives. William Rehnquist, for instance, is in poor health may resign in the next 4 years. Antonin Scalia is definitely eager to make more money, and may not stick around. Even if Bush appointed die-hard right-to-lifers to replace them, the balance of power on the Court wouldn’t change a whit.
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“Liberal” and “Conservative” are important but insufficient labels in describing a judge. I’d say it’s equally important to judge whether a judge is an offensive or defensive liberal/conservative.
What does THAT mean? Well, William Brennan and Steven Breyer can both be described as “liberal.” Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy are both “conservative.” But their temperaments and approaches to the law couldn’t be much more different.
Brennan was an offensive liberal- when he saw a social problem, he wanted to attack it and set it right through the power of the Court, whether or not there was ANYTHING in the Constitution supporting him. He casually went about re-writing the Constitution to suit his personal desires (SOMETIMES, of course, with beneficial results).
Breyer, on the other hand, is NOT going around making up new rights, or reading new rights into the COnstitution. His liberalism is, essentially, defensive. He mainly just wants to preserve and protect the rights created by earlier, more activist liberal judges.
Antonin Scalia is an offensive conservative. When he sees what he considers a perversion of the law, of justice, of the text of the Constitution, he’s eager to go to war to set things right.
Anthony Kennedy, on the other hand, is a defensive conservative. He generally agrees with Scalia that things went too far under the Warren Court… but has far too much reverence for precedent to overturn even rulings he finds illogical and unjust (like Roe vs. Wade).
So… even if George W. Bush won, and got a chance to appoint four Supreme Court justices, and even IF he made a good-faith effort to pick people likely to overturn Roe vs. Wade (and I suspect he wouldn’t; George just isn’t that ideological), he’s likely to end up with a bunch more Anthony Kennedys: guys who MIGHT allow some tinkering with Roe Vs. Wade, who MIGHT allow for a few additional restrictions, but who probably WOULDN’T have the audacity to throw it out entirely.
My sense is, sad to say, George W. would give us Kennedys and Souters- not Scalias.
Oddly enough, even Al Gore is HIGHLY unlikely to appoint any William Brennans to the Court. Al Gore’s “liberal” appointees will PROBABLY be guys looking to protect the Warren Court’s legacy, NOT to create a NEW activist Court.
So, IF my assumptions are correct, the question is, does it really make a HUGE difference whether we have four new Steven Breyers or four new Anthony Kennedys on the Court?
Yes, SOME difference. But FAR less than ideologues on either side think.
