White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales is an amiable man with an inspiring personal story. One of eight children of uneducated Mexican-American immigrants, he grew up in a Texas house with no hot water or telephone. He would be the first Hispanic attorney general. He has the complete trust of the president, whom he has loyally served for four years in Washington, and in Texas before that. He is far less divisive and confrontational than the departing John Ashcroft.

Liberal and conservative interest groups see Supreme Court appointments as a president’s most important domestic legacy. So now they are in their quadrennial lather about how Republican appointees could swing the closely balanced Court decisively to the right, and how Democratic appointees could swing it to the left, especially on big social issues that include abortion rights, affirmative action, gay rights, and religion.

President Bush may well have an opportunity to nominate someone to the Supreme Court. Here are some of the most talked-about candidates:

Republicans and Democrats are nearing the brink of nuclear warfare over President Bush’s judicial nominations. Unless both sides compromise, the damage to the government and the nation could be profound. Hostilities have raged on and off since the 1987 Battle of Bork, resulting in a downward spiral of partisan bitterness and recriminations. The latest and biggest escalation has been Senate Democrats’ all-but-unprecedented filibusters of professionally well-qualified Bush nominees who are simply too conservative for the Democrats’ taste. And now, as both sides prepare for a climactic battle in the event of any Supreme Court retirements, Republicans are threatening the so-called nuclear option.

A Supreme Court test of whether candidates for elective state judgeships have a First Amendment right to express their views on legal and political issues has helped bring into focus a disturbing trend in some of the 39 states that choose judges by popular election. Judicial campaigns, once sleepy affairs that incumbents won in a walk, are getting more politicized, meaner, more expensive, and more awash in special-interest money.

Federal District Judge Charles Pickering Sr. of Mississippi has the misfortune of being the first Bush federal appeals court nominee openly targeted by liberal groups and Senators determined to block the President from transforming the lower courts-and, if he gets a chance, the Supreme Court-into conservative bastions.

President Bush made a strategically smart move in the 15-year-old war of the judges by announcing on May 9 a slate of 11 nominees carefully balanced both to please conservative activists and to disarm mainstream Democrats whose help he will need to avoid partisan gridlock.