The Supremes

Yesterday was the first day of the October Term of the U.S. Supreme Court. This is a reminder that judicial appointments to the Court, and throughout the federal judiciary, are also on the line in the upcoming presidential election.

The Federalist Society was founded in 1982 to counter the alleged liberal orthodoxy in American law schools.

From The Federalist Society's mission statement: The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies is a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order. It is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be. The Society seeks both to promote an awareness of these principles and to further their application through its activities.

The Federalist Society has two co-chairs: Robert H. Bork, who was not confirmed as a justice on the Supreme Court, and Orrin Hatch. Both are conservative ideologues.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samual Alito, George Bush nominees, have been members of and molded by the tenets of The Federalist Society. Chief Justice John Roberts during his nomination process said he couldn't remember if he had been a member. However, he was. Justice Antonin Scalia recently addressed the Society in Chicago and claimed that a course like poverty law isn't a legitimate subject of study in law school.

It's not just an issue of abortion and the right to access to reproductive health care. The Supreme Court has issued some bizarre decisions these last years, waivering between ideological analysis and pure political pragmatism: Bush v. Gore is the most obvious example. Although the conservative members of the Supreme Court claim to believe in states' rights, when it came to crowning Bush president, it ignored the constitutional role that states play in regulating elections.

Although a narrow majority has regularly condemned the Bush administration for denying all rights to detainees in Guantanamo, the majority has been slight and the bigger issues of the power of the executive have been guided by Federalist Society dogma. Cheney's unusual depiction of the vice president as being a part of the legislative branch and not the executive as a way of removing his papers from public archiving might be sustained by this Supreme Court.

The average age of the current court justice is 68. The oldest member of the Court, Justice Stevens, is 82. The chief Justice is only 53. According to Laurence Tribe, a professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, the Court as an instrument of progressive legal change is no longer.

Think Supreme Court and federal district and appellate court nominations as you get ready to cast your vote.