HOW COVERT CAN IT BE IF IT'S EVEN IN THE PROSPECT? :

The Power and the Glory : Who needs the Christian Coalition when you've got the the White House? The religious right's covert crusade (Nina J. Easton, 5.20.02, American Prospect)

Overturning Roe v. Wade has become the signature concern of the Christian right, and probably the one uppermost in the minds of those who heard Rove's speech. Conservative evangelicals are furious that Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices have helped keep abortion legal. When the time comes to fill a vacancy on the high court, they will demand that a paper trail be followed on any appointee to assure themselves that he or she is staunchly anti-abortion. "Another [Supreme Court Justice David] Souter," warned Bauer, pointedly referring to Bush Senior's appointee, "is not going to be tolerated."

Christian-right groups are already gearing up to wage war with liberals over Bush's first Supreme Court appointment. The Christian Coalition is soliciting money for its own Judicial Task Force, calling the next couple of months "a watershed in American history." Concerned Women for America, a far more robust group with a daily radio show and 500,000 members, has just hired lobbyist Thomas Jipping--historically an important figure in judicial battles--to run its judicial operations. The Traditional Values Coalition also has a judicial monitoring project.

But no anti-abortion Supreme Court nominee is likely to be confirmed without a Republican Senate. And in order to capture the Senate, the Republicans require not only money but an energized grass-roots base -- something the Christian right is best equipped to provide. Political analyst Charles Cook described the Senate races as "a perfectly level playing field." In the 1990s, conservative Christian activists enjoyed their greatest electoral successes in similarly tight races. Especially in Southern states, say conservative Christian leaders, there is latent anger to be tapped, sparked by a widespread perception that White House nominees who are also evangelical Christians--Pickering and Ashcroft among them--are automatically pegged by liberal lawmakers as unfit for public office.

The campaign year has already begun for Christian-right groups. Of particular interest are Republican Representative Jim Talent's efforts to unseat Jean Carnahan in Missouri, and Republican John Thune's challenge to incumbent Senator Tim Johnson in South Dakota. Bauer's political action committee (PAC), called the Campaign for Working Families, will spend about $1 million on congressional races. The Family Research Council, meanwhile, ran a half-million-dollar ad campaign comparing Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The ad, which ran in South Dakota newspapers and was sponsored by the group's PAC, placed photos of Hussein and Daschle side by side, asking what the two men have in common. Both, the ad asserted, oppose drilling for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. What that cause has to do with the council's stated agenda of promoting marriage and family as the "seedbed of virtue" is anyone's guess. But the group is also attacking Senate Democrats for allegedly stalling on the consideration of Bush's Court of Appeals nominations.

With the rightward drift of the Democrats on legislative issues and the power the Court has aggrandized to itself over the past century or so, it seems not much of an overstatement to say that the only reason that elections matter is to determine who will get to appoint and who confirm judges. America would be little different today had Bush I beaten Clinton in '92 or Gore beaten Bush II in '00 except for one significant factor, the judiciary. As the Court churns out 5-4 decisions, conservatives can only tear at their hair as we dream about how different things might be if we'd avoided Ginsburg and Breyer and gotten say Hatch and Ashcroft instead. These are the stakes that matter this fall and the reason that the GOP has to pull out all the stops to try and retake the Senate. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 3, 2002 12:25 PM