Boston Globe
Charlie Savage, Globe Staff
July 28, 2004
The billboard looms over the FleetCenter, teasing the attendees at the Democratic Convention below: "Think! about the Supreme Court -- Kerry's Scary."
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While Democrats will tend toward the opposite conclusion, judiciary watchers on both the left and the right agree that the power to appoint Supreme Court justices is likely to be the most far-reaching prize in this presidential campaign.
Two to four of the nine seats are expected to change owners in the next four years, a development that could replace the court's delicate ideological balance with a solid majority on one side that could control how the nation's laws are interpreted for a generation. That prospect brought delegates and activists to two convention-related events yesterday.
The day began with a symposium moderated by actor Alec Baldwin and sponsored by the liberal group People for the American Way.
Speakers suggested that, if reelected, President Bush would appoint extremist conservatives who would overturn 70 years of liberal jurisprudence on issues ranging from abortion to civil rights.
Later, the increasingly bitter judicial nomination process was the focus of a debate involving the liberal group Alliance for Justice, headed by longtime activist Nan Aron, and the conservative group Committee for Justice, headed by former White House counsel C. Boyden Gray.
Aron's group is targeting Attorney General John Ashcroft's privacy policies through a website at ashcroftresign.com. Gray's group is the sponsor of the kerrysscary.com billboards.
They were joined by Bill Marshall, associate White House counsel during the Clinton administration, and Victoria Toensing, a Justice Department official during the Reagan administration.
Both sides bemoaned the lack of civility in the judicial nomination process, though each faulted the other for causing it. Toensing accused the Democrats of an unconstitutional power grab for filibustering 10 of Bush's judicial nominees, who she said would receive majority support in a floor vote. But Marshall said that was no worse than that of Republicans keeping many of Clinton's nominations from getting a hearing.
The panelists speculated about who might be nominated to the Supreme Court, depending on the election's outcome. Bush's possibilities include two conservative judges on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, J. Harvey Wilkinson and Michael Luttig, as well as Bush's former solicitor general, Theodore Olson.
John Kerry's possible nominees include former Stanford Law School dean Kathleen Sullivan, University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, and two former Clinton administration solicitors general, Seth Waxman and Walter Dellinger.