Supreme Fight to the Finish
Big bucks, bad blood--a court battle like no other
But many conservatives say they're confident Bush will chart a more conservative course for the court. "The president's nominees to the appellate courts have been originalist, as far as we can tell," says Tom Minnery, vice president for public policy at Focus on the Family. "That indicates that he's got great conviction about sending the right candidate through the confirmation process."
Still, Minnery doesn't welcome friction between groups like Focus and the Bush administration. "Now we're pitted against the White House, and I regret that," he says, blaming news reports about the Christian right's grievances over Gonzales that overlooked the right's enthusiasm about Bush's reiterating his pledge to support conservative justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
"Litmus test." On the left, the liberal MoveOn PAC has pounced on the apparent discord between the White House and the religious right, arguing that the Christian right does not speak for mainstream Americans. "They have a litmus test, and Bush wants them to be quiet because they are very specific about rights they want to take away," says Ben Brandzel, MoveOn's advocacy director. "They want to tell families how to live, how to die, how to worship."
C. Boyden Gray, the head of the Committee for Justice, an organization founded in part to promote Bush's judicial nominees, says that dissension on the right isn't "a bad thing--it shows that it's not a monolith, that we're not in lockstep." Gray says the "western conservative values" embodied by O'Connor and valued by Bush on issues like property rights and employer rules are more important to most Americans than abortion, though he predicted that the nomination fight will be about abortion. "It's not avoidable," he says.
But business interests have their own priorities. Former Michigan Gov. John Engler, now president of the National Association of Manufacturers, says his members want a justice friendly to their effort to rein in legal costs. "We've done a pretty good job in legislative bodies trying to fix legal problems," Engler says, "but every time we go to federal court, they're throwing out our answers and solutions."
While much of the focus over the past week has been on the religious right's criticism of Gonzales, the president may also feel pressure to name a woman to replace O'Connor. The names of 10th Circuit Court Judges Edith Jones and Edith Brown Clement have been mentioned frequently over the past week.
Others see different pressures. Former Attorney General Edwin Meese, who is working with Gray to help push Bush's judicial choices, is "looking for someone who is faithful to the Constitution, regardless of who retired." Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, says it's also not about "whether you wear a skirt but if you understand women's lives."
The stakes are sky high. Both sides are gearing up to spend as much as $100 million on a nomination battle, or battles. Now many are waiting to see what, if any, role the "Gang of 14" --the seven Democrats and seven Republican senators who combined last month to thwart the "nuclear option" that would have ended Democrats' ability to filibuster judicial nominees--will play. In exchange for Republican votes against the rules change, the Democrats agreed that they would filibuster a Bush nominee only under "extraordinary circumstances." Whatever that means.
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