Like George H.W. Bush (41), John McCain is distrusted by the religious right. What does that mean? Not what a gay friend just told me--that a President McCain will not advance the agenda of so-called "Christians" who are obsessed with homosexuals and abortion.
In the past, Senator McCain had been open-minded about gay rights and even abortion. (Somewhere out there, McCain is on video about how if his daughter got pregnant, it would be a "family decision" about what to do. And he praised one of the heroes of 9-11-01, a gay man who helped on Filght 93.)
That was McCain eight years ago, when he should have switched parties after being trashed by Bush in South Carolina.
Now, like Bush 41, a President McCain, even if he is not planning on running for re-election, will be under immense pressure to appoint judges like Alito, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas. Activist judges with agendas.
These include overruling Roe v. Wade and implicitly, Lawrence v. Texas, both decisions based on a right to privacy that so-called "conservatives" claim is not in the Constitution--so it does not exist. So abortion rights and gay rights are on the ballot this year because it's likely that at least three Supreme Court justices will retire in the next four years.
Last week at the Santa Fe Opera, Justice Ruth Bader Ginzburg was in attendance all four nights I attended. Federal marshals were there to protect her, with explosive-trained dogs. I chatted with members of the security detail, knowing that it was Ginzburg they were there to protect.
(Some people came up asking if the President was there--can you imagine? And it couldn't be Obama; he gets labeled "elitist" for preferring arugula to hot dogs. Going to the opera would be like Kerry wind-surfing!)
Anyway, John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginzburg, and David Souter seem to me to be likely to retire in the next four years. I suspect that all three would have already retired if Kerry had won in 2004, or maybe even if Gore had not been robbed in 2000. (If only Thurgood Marshall had hung on back in 1991!)
The right to privacy and freedom from governmental interference in family life, personal choices about love and marital relations, educating children, etc. is well established in jurisprudence dating back almost a hundred years. But that right is in danger because these so-called "strict constructionists" claim that the only rights individuals have are those enumerated in the Constitution. They ignore the history of the adoption of the Constitution where the concern about the Bill of Rights was precisely that by enumerating specific rights, the Constitution might be interpreted as "granting" only those rights.
I'll skip an attempt to discuss "natural law", "social contract", etc. just to say that the basic argument is about whether you get rights from the government or if you establish government to protect rights you have from God or natural law. Suffice it to say that the Scalia, Thomas, et al. crowd, constantly claiming to respect the "Founding Fathers", are in trouble here. The "Founding Fathers" were worried that someone might claim that the only rights people have are those that are enumerated, so they added the Ninth Amendment to the Constitution. But now we have jurists like Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito who claim exactly that--you get whatever rights you have from government. And they call themselves "conservatives". I guess they don't know what the "blessings of liberty" are.
Some of those blessings would include family planning and the freedom to love naturally. Those blessings are on the ballot this year. As President, McCain will likely appoint Supreme Court justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade and Lawrence v. Texas. And I would not be at all surprised if a President McCain might appoint John Yoo, or David Addington (Cheney's goon), authors of our current "torture" regime. Even if they could not get confirmed by a Democratic Senate. Another Bork circus.
Barack Obama is a constitutional scholar. So was Bill Clinton, and I'd like to be hearing more about that. With Barack, we are likely to get some justices like Jonathan Turley, Neal Katyal, and maybe even Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The right wing is all abuzz about this issue. So why aren't we hearing anything about it from the Dems?