Las Vegas Sun

June 3, 2012

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SUN EDITORIAL:

A mainstream philosophy

Electing Obama is critical in keeping Supreme Court from turning even more to the right

Sunday, Oct. 26, 2008 | 2:08 a.m.

Of the reasons to vote for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, one of the most important involves the direction of the nine-member U.S. Supreme Court. Presidents nominate candidates to the high court, and a Senate majority must confirm those nominees before they can take their lifetime positions.

The current court has four justices who embrace far-right legal principles, including Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, who were nominated by President Bush. There are also four justices who follow mainstream legal philosophies. And then there is the swing justice, Anthony Kennedy, a conservative who infrequently sides with the more moderate wing of the court.

If Obama is elected, it is likely that the balance of the court will not change. But if Republican John McCain is victorious, there is a greater chance the court will wind up with a solid right-wing majority, which could have a detrimental effect on abortion rights, environmental regulations, worker rights, race-related issues and consumer protections, among other things. And that majority could continue to exist long after the next president leaves office.

The reason McCain could have a greater effect than Obama on the balance of the court is that the justices most likely to step down over the next four years are from its mainstream wing. The two eldest justices, John Paul Stevens, 88, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 75, come from the moderate to liberal side. We’re confident that Obama, a former constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago, would nominate the right kind of justices.

During the last presidential debate, Obama said: “I will look for those judges who have an outstanding judicial record, who have the intellect, and who hopefully have a sense of what real-world folks are going through.”

In contrast, McCain would certainly do everything in his power to tilt the court heavily to the right. He has called the court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion, “a bad decision” that should be overturned. Because the court is closely divided on that contentious issue, having one more far-right justice on the bench would likely result in a reversal. That wouldn’t sit too well with Nevadans, an overwhelming majority of whom have supported abortion rights because they believe women have a right to control their own bodies. Unlike McCain, Obama supports abortion rights, so it is unlikely any of his nominees would rule against Roe v. Wade.

Another easy way to tell the differences between Obama and McCain on the subject of Supreme Court nominees is to look at their voting records. Obama opposed the nominations of Roberts and Alito; McCain supported them.

Roberts and Alito, along with Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, are examples of the right-wing judicial activists that recent Republican presidents have nominated.

Roberts, 53, and Alito, 58, wasted little time asserting their right-wing ideologies. They sided with narrow 5-4 majorities in upholding a federal ban on late-term abortions, rejecting voluntary school desegregation programs in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., and denying challenges to a federal program that instructs religious organizations on how to apply for federal grants.

They also sided with a narrow majority in rejecting the arguments of a female supervisor who didn’t discover that she was paid less than men who did the same job until her 19-year career ended. The court majority ruled that under the law she would have had to file a wage discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission within 180 days of the pay discrepancy. The other justices — Stevens, Ginsburg, David Souter and Stephen Breyer — had argued unsuccessfully that many wage discrimination victims would not even be aware of the unequal pay within that period of time.

In a notable 5-4 decision with Roberts and Alito on the losing end, the court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency has authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. If another right-wing judicial activist had been on the court, that ruling likely would have gone the other way.

It should be noted that only a small number of cases actually reach the Supreme Court. Most never get past the nation’s 94 district courts or 13 appellate courts, which establish the bulk of the nation’s legal precedents. That’s another reason to support Obama, because the president also nominates the lower court judges.

Stacking the Supreme Court and the lower courts with too many right-wing judges can do much long-term damage to the rights of ordinary citizens. That is but one reason why it is critical for Americans to elect Obama the next president of the United States.

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