The New Republic

During every presidential campaign for the last two decades, liberals have predicted an apocalypse in the Supreme Court. In their dire visions, as many as four justices are always about to retire, meaning that a Republican victory would turn the court radically to the right and lead to the certain overturning of Roe v. Wade. READ MORE >>

“THANK GOD for President Bush, and thank God for Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito,” intoned Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention last week, after the Supreme Court announced its decision in Gonzales v. Carhart, the so-called partial-birth abortion case. But Land also should have thanked Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose majority opinion dangerously reframes the abortion debate.   READ MORE >>

by Cass Sunstein No one doubts the sheer ability of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. No one should doubt their characters or their commitment to the law. But at the time of their confirmations, there was real disagreement about whether they would turn out to be essentially predictable in their votes, or whether their commitment to the law, and their lawyerly skills, would lead them, on occasion, in surprising directions. Many people, both liberal and conservative, argued that "you can never predict what a judge will do." READ MORE >>

WITNESSING THEIR FAITH: RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE ON SUPREME COURT JUSTICES AND THEIR OPINIONS By Jay Alan Sekulow(Rowman & Littlefield, 349 pp., $27.95) I.   THE CONFIRMATION OF JUSTICE Samuel Alito brings to five the number of Catholics on the Supreme Court of the United States. All Americans can be proud of this fact, or more precisely, proud of the fact that Alito’s religious affiliation never became an issue during his confirmation process. It marks tremendous progress over a constitutional history in which the fear of Catholicism was a recurrent theme. READ MORE >>

SUPREME RETORT READ MORE >>

Cracking down on lobbyists is a hot issue in Washington these days, but it hasn't quite made it to the Senate Judiciary Committee. On day one of his confirmation hearing, Samuel Alito introduced America to his fine-looking family, spread across a row behind his right shoulder. But that tall, chinless man who could be frequently glimpsed over Alito's other shoulder wasn't some Alito brother-in-law. It was Ed Gillespie, K Street's most connected post- Abramoff Republican and part of the White House's large team of Alito handlers and spinners shepherding him through the Senate. READ MORE >>

In 1994, the eminent evangelical historian Mark Noll wrote a scorching polemic about his own religion called The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. The book lamented the "intellectual disaster of fundamentalism" and its toll on evangelical political and theological thought. All around him, Noll saw "a weakness for treating the verses of the Bible as pieces in a jigsaw puzzle that needed only to be sorted and then fit together to possess a finished picture of divine truth." READ MORE >>