Courting Disaster: What's really at stake in this election?

[DaveSZ]

http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=15644


Americans “Courting Disaster” with Next Supreme Court Justices


At Stake With Next President’s Nominees to High Court: Civil Rights, Privacy, Clean Air & Water, Religious Liberty and Other Rights and Legal Protections

With crucial Supreme Court rulings continuing to be decided by narrow margins, and with a Supreme Court vacancy long overdue, the next President is likely to nominate new Supreme Court justices who will have a huge and long-lasting impact on constitutional rights, liberties and laws, according to a report released today by People For the American Way Foundation. Courting Disaster 2004 documents that additional Supreme Court justices in the mold of current Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas would have a devastating impact on civil rights, privacy and reproductive rights, the First Amendment, environmental protection, and much more.

“Courting Disaster makes it clear just how much is at stake with the next Supreme Court justices,” said People For the American Way Foundation President Ralph G. Neas. “Most Americans have no idea how important the Supreme Court is to their daily lives – or that so many basic legal and constitutional protections are hanging by a one- or two-vote thread.”

Neas noted that it has been ten years since the last Supreme Court confirmation, the longest interval between vacancies since 1823. “Over the past half century, there has been on the average one Supreme Court nomination every two years,” Neas said. “We are long overdue. In fact, over the next few years, we could have multiple vacancies, comparable to the four vacancies between 1969 and 1972 and the five between 1986 and 1991. That would define American law for a generation or more.”

Those multiple vacancies would occur in the context of an aggressive right-wing campaign to create a federal judiciary dominated by a legal theory that would overturn many of the legal and social justice gains of the past 70 years. Proponents of a new “federalism” are pushing to have the courts return the nation to a pre-New Deal legal era when states’ rights and property rights were given greater constitutional importance than the protection of individuals’ rights and liberties. On the Supreme Court, the most aggressive promoters of this theory are Justices Scalia and Thomas, who President Bush has said will be his models for future high court nominees.

-continued

[DemBones DemBones]

1. Sadly enough, I fear a Bush*-stacked SCOTUS

would be the least of our worries.

[DaveSZ]

2. There is hardly anything worse that I can imagine

than Bush ruling for another 40 years from the bench, but perhaps you can think of something even worse.

:)

Actually if he wins again and retains Congress, we'll have a fascist state pretty much. It would be the last US election ever.