It may now be unconstitutional for a public school teacher or student leader to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in class. Or at a football game. Or at a graduation. Or to recite the Declaration of Independence. Or to sing the national anthem.
MARGARET WARNER: Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court term ended with a burst of decisions on hot-button issues ranging from abortion to school prayer to whether the Boy Scouts could expel a gay scoutmaster. The fact that many of these cases were decided by a 5-4 vote prompted a flood of articles and editorials on how the outcome of this year’s presidential race could alter the balance on the court.
What’s more, both liberal and conservative groups are now trying to energize their supporters by arguing that this election could reshape the court for decades to come. For our own discussion of what’s at stake for the court in this Presidential campaign, we turn to Stuart Taylor, legal affairs correspondent for National Journal and Newsweek, and author of last week’s Newsweek cover story on this issue; Anthony Lewis, a columnist with the New York Times; C. Boyden Gray, former White House counsel in the Bush administration, now in private practice in Washington; and Ralph Neas, People for the American Way and author of a 75-page report on this topic called "Courting Disaster."
Welcome, gentlemen. Ralph Neas, in this report, you wrote that the court is just one or two votes away from can your tailing fundamental rights that millions of Americans take for granted. Is there really that much at stake in this election?
Al Gore saw his opening, and he took it. Campaigning last Wednesday in Backlick, Ohio, the vice president unexpectedly tossed aside the top of a scheduled speech about energy and the environment and instead launched into a passionate lecture about the importance of the Supreme Court. All morning, Gore had been asking aides to inform him as soon as the court handed down its expected final opinions of the year. At about 11 a.m., just as Air Force Two was touching down in Ohio, he got the news he’d been waiting to hear: the justices had struck down laws in 31 states banning so-called partial-birth abortions, the controversial late-term procedure denounced by abortion opponents. But the vote was close–5-4–and the vice president couldn’t wait to seize the opportunity to raise doubts about George W. Bush. The vice president immediately reworked his speech. “The next president will nominate… perhaps four justices to the Supreme Court,” Gore warned in the new, improved text. “One extra vote on the wrong side,” he said, “would change the outcome, and a woman’s right to choose would be taken away.”
Gore’s warning was an exaggeration, to say the least. In fact, six of the nine current justices have supported fairly broad abortion rights. Still, Bush chose to downplay the decision, wary of being dragged into an abortion brawl that could put him on the wrong side of public opinion, sending moderate voters–especially women–fleeing. But he couldn’t avoid the matter entirely: Bush issued a terse statement saying he would “fight for a ban on partial-birth abortion.” Later in the week he cut a deal to keep the GOP’s hard-line anti-abortion plank in the party’s platform.
On July 2, when Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, said on NBC’s Meet the Press that the current Supreme Court is "centrist-left," many a Washington journalist (among others) sniggered. Hadn’t Hatch read the papers or watched any televised news within the past few days-or the past 25 years? Did he miss the recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times, which called the Court "unblushingly conservative"?
My column of June 24, embarrassingly headlined "Why We Should All Be Grateful to Janet Reno," seems to have been overtaken by events. It commended the Attorney General for having twice (in late 1997 and again in late 1998) spurned subordinates’ advice that she unleash an outside investigator on Vice President Al Gore. Hours after it went to press, the news broke that yet another subordinate had recently done the same. Oops.
As the leakage of internal Justice Department documents has swollen to a flood, Attorney General Janet Reno has been weathering a new round of attacks for "protecting" Vice President Al Gore and President Clinton by repeatedly refusing to trigger judicial appointment of an independent counsel to investigate the two men’s roles in various campaign finance abuses of 1996.
Imagine yourself a hard-working, law-abiding, young black man in any big city in America. You hail cabs, and they speed by as though you were invisible, only to pick up a white person down the block. You call to order a pizza, only to have the delivery driver refuse to come to your door or never show up at all. You go out to buy yourself a pizza, only to get pulled over for "driving while black" or stopped and frisked for walking while black. Such outrages are a constant theme of your daily life.
Justice Antonin Scalia’s demeanor was charming, his delivery witty. But his message was serious, and some of his words were blunt. Scalia’s subject at an April 18 symposium hosted by Michigan State University in a Washington hotel was "judicial activism." The 64-year-old Reagan appointee’s main targets were "the liberal [Supreme] Court of the `60s and `70s"-which he said sometimes used "phony and disreputable" reasoning to distort the meaning of laws-and the U.S. Congress of more recent years, which he accused of "legislative activism." And his conclusions went to the fundament of our constitutional system.
Countering academic critics who have turned the old imprecation of activism against Scalia and his conservative colleagues, Scalia said that "the current Court is considerably less activist … than the Court of a few decades ago." He acknowledged that "conservatives are just as willing to play this game as liberals are now," and that "we are striking down as many federal statutes from year to year as the Warren Court at its peak." But he noted that the Court has been voiding fewer state and local statutes than it did in previous decades. And he stressed that most federal and state laws that have fallen lately have "involved attempts by a legislature to do something quite novel and often even downright bizarre." He lingered on "bizarre."
One staple of Washington life is the phony scandal: a conflagration of bogus accusations and intimations of criminality and sleaze, fanned to an inferno by the media and partisan enemies of the accused, only to finally fade away for lack of evidence.
"The 1994 Violence Against Women Act provided (among other things) that victims of rape, domestic abuse, and other "crimes of violence motivated by gender" could file federal civil rights lawsuits against their alleged assailants. The measure was nothing if not popular. Championed by President Clinton and feminist groups, it sailed through the House and Senate.
