From todays'
globe
As liberals and conservatives gear up for a multimillion-dollar battle over a potential Supreme Court vacancy, a growing divide on the right threatens the unity of President Bush's coalition: Conservative legal scholars want their evangelical allies to keep quiet and take a back seat in any nomination battle.
Evangelical attacks on judges over the Terri Schiavo feeding tube case backfired on Republicans, polls taken in the spring indicated. Now, many conservatives fear the religious right could hurt the party's cause by using faith-based arguments about abortion, same-sex marriage, and the separation of church and state to promote a Supreme Court nominee.
More below the fold.
Instead, many Republican lawyers with close ties to the White House are determined to present such a nominee to the country in the religiously neutral terms Bush used in last year's campaign: as a judge who ''knows the difference between personal opinion and strict interpretation of the law."
''We should be looking for outstanding jurists, not ministers," said Victoria Toensing, a Justice Department official in the Reagan administration.
But grass-roots evangelicals, frustrated by GOP-appointed judges who have not overturned the Roe v. Wade abortion ruling, say they've learned their lesson from past Republican Supreme Court appointments David H. Souter, Anthony Kennedy, and Sandra Day O'Connor. They said they will demand clear positions from any conservative nominee.
The good news is that instead of a battle between Democrats and Republicans, we're going to have a battle between Republicans and Republicans and Democrats.