Court back in voters' sight

Los Angeles Times: Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist's hospitalization was not the usual sort of October surprise. But the 80-year-old jurist's thyroid cancer is a jolting reminder, if one is needed, that shaping the federal judiciary -- most notably the Supreme Court -- is one of the momentous things presidents do.
Debate over terrorism and jobs has overshadowed campaign talk about the federal courts. But the next four years are all but certain to entail picking more than one Supreme Court justice. On this divided court, any single appointee could shift the balance.
The Supreme Court has been the final arbiter of the nation's most wrenching controversies, from slavery through civil rights and the 2000 presidential election. Today's battles center on the war on terror, the Bush administration's rapacious environmental policies and social issues like gay marriage, abortion and the role of religion in public life.
The decade since Justice Stephen G. Breyer joined the court has been the longest period without a Supreme Court appointment since the early 1800s. All the justices but one -- Clarence Thomas -- are over 65. Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens have also been treated for cancer, and in recent years there has been widespread speculation that one or another would retire.
Although the court's four-sentence statement on Rehnquist's medical condition said that the chief justice expected to return to work next week, news of his illness will only intensify retirement buzz.
During the debates, President Bush said he wanted only judges who were "strict constructionists" of the Constitution, a statement that masks his own record. He has repeatedly pointed to hyper-conservative justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas as his models for a Supreme Court appointee. His 201 nominees now sitting on the nation's trial and appeals courts -- 24% of all active judges -- were promoted and ideologically screened by the partisan Federalist Society. Among them are men and women who have stated that homosexuality and abortion should be criminalized, that wives should be subordinate to their husbands and that God created the United States as a Christian nation.
John F. Kerry has said he would not pick judges who would overturn Roe vs. Wade. He also promises to appoint moderates to the bench. The mark of a good justice, he said, is "when you're reading their opinion, you can't tell if it's written by a man or a woman, a liberal or a conservative, a Muslim, a Jew or a Christian." Jurists chosen more for legal skill than ideological pedigree are best able to protect this nation's principles and fairly balance competing claims. Bush's record offers little evidence of such moderation.