ON DEADLINE: High court nominations become issue

By WALTER R. MEARS, AP Special Correspondent 20 minutes ago

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - Potential Supreme Court nominations seldom get much attention in presidential campaigns. The topic is hypothetical, a step away from the daily political fare.

When the presidential votes are counted on Nov. 4, the most lasting imprint of the choice Americans make will not be a matter of policy or personality, but of the third branch of government, the federal courts and especially the Supreme Court.

A Democratic president probably could not tip the balance of the Supreme Court because relatively liberal justices hold the two seats most likely to come open by 2013. John Paul Stevens is 88, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 75. Should either or both be replaced by a Democratic president, the attitudes of the new justice probably would be in line with theirs.

With Sen. Barack Obama nearing the Democratic nomination, a sizable bloc of Democratic women are angry that Sen. Hillary Clinton is losing, and some are threatening to bolt to McCain or just stay home on Election Day. Some surveys suggest that up to a quarter of the women who voted for Clinton in the Democratic primaries say they wouldn‘t support an Obama ticket.

Supreme Court nominations usually get a brief, almost obligatory brush in presidential campaign debates. Obama may want to change that. The polls indicate that a majority of McCain‘s supporters also favor retaining abortion rights, and that many of them think he does too.

But the view he expressed in 1999 was the one break in a record of opposition to abortion rights, in Senate votes and in his campaigns in 2000 and 2008. McCain discussed his views on judicial appointments in a speech in Winston-Salem, N.C., early in May, saying President Bush‘s appointees would "serve as the model for my own nominees."

Obama said at the time that he was concerned "that the conservative Supreme Court justices will look for other opportunities to erode Roe v. Wade, which is established federal law and a matter of equal rights for women."

Promising to change that, McCain named a Justice Advisory Committee to counsel him on judicial appointments. The chairmen are firm conservatives, Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas and Theodore B. Olson, the former solicitor general. Both those names have come up as possible nominees to the Supreme Court in the past.

Obama says his court choices would be in the model of the late Chief Justice Earl Warren and current justices Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and David H. Souter. "I want people on the bench who have enough empathy, enough feeling for what ordinary people are going through," he said.

The next Senate is likely to be more Democratic than this one. Republicans have been having trouble in special congressional elections and in the polls. And there are 23 Republican Senate seats at stake in 2008, while the Democrats are defending only 12.

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EDITOR‘S NOTE — Walter R. Mears reported on presidential campaigns for The Associated Press from 1960 until 2004. He is retired and lives in Chapel Hill, N.C. On Deadline is an occasional column.



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