Petition Urges Bush to Nominate Conservative to Supreme Court
by Allie Martin and Jody Brown
July 6, 2005
(AgapePress) - A petition with tens of thousands of signatures from concerned Christians urging the president to select a conservative nominee to the Supreme Court will be delivered later this week.For weeks now, the Center for Reclaiming America has allowed citizens to sign the online "Judicial Vacancy" petition. So far, more than 200,000 people have signed the document, which calls on President Bush to select a nominee who will uphold the original meaning of the Constitution and defend the right of people to publicly acknowledge God. With last week's resignation of Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the Chief Executive now has his first opportunity to nominate a judge to the high court.
Dr. Gary Cass is executive director of the Center for Reclaiming America. Cass is convinced that if the nation "continue[s] down this road of a so-called living constitution, essentially we have no constitution." The end result of that, he contends, is "the opinions of five justices -- that becomes the foundation. And as we've seen, many of these rulings that have been handed down to us, even recently, the precedents they cite for the basis of their ruling is international laws or social science."
Cass also asserts that President Bush must be true to his campaign promises. "Hopefully the president will nominate a younger person who will be on the court for many years to come [and] who can bring us back to our traditional way of approaching the Constitution," he says.
Such a nominee, according to Cass, is someone who does not view the Constitution as a living document that can "morph into whatever any judge wants it to say" but actually examines the intent of the founding fathers. "And the president has promised that that's the temperament of the judges that he will be appointing," Cass adds.
The petition also calls for the president to choose a nominee who affirms that children in the womb deserve the same legal protection afforded the rest of the nation's citizens.
'Gut-Check' Time for Family Advocates
Cass is joined in his call for a conservative nominee by Gary Bauer of the Campaign for Working Families. He describes the vacancy on the Supreme Court a "gut-check" time for the pro-family movement, and notes that many Americans "have given sweat, toil, and tears" to elect a conservative president and a conservative Senate majority for precisely this moment.
"This is our time," Bauer says, urging on his fellow conservatives. "[It is] our opportunity to restore balance to the Supreme Court and to end the hostility to our most deeply held values." Those values, he predicts, will be central to the expected battle over confirmation of Bush's nominee to the federal bench.
"[The White House] should make it fully clear [to Senate Democrats] that while they did not ask their nominees about specific controversies, they did pick someone with the philosophy that makes them confident their nominee has no problem with 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance, no problem with the Ten Commandments on the courthouse lawn, and understands that marriage is between a man and a woman."
Dr. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission concurs. Justice O'Connor's resignation, he says, opens the door for the opportunity that "millions of Americans have been praying for" for well over a decade.
"That opportunity," he explains, "is to redress the imbalance in the Supreme Court and to make it a solidly original-intent court that will interpret the Constitution, not view it as an 'evolving' document to be rewritten according to the personal views of the justices with allusions to international law."
Land feels President Bush's long-term legacy will be tied directly to the types of nominees he sends to the Senate for confirmation to the Supreme Court. "For President Bush, social conservatives, and the senators they helped elect, the moment of truth has arrived," says Land.
Even Number = Odd Results
The Washington, DC-based group Coalition for a Fair Judiciary points out how critical it is that a new justice be in place by October, when the next high court's next term begins. Based on filibusters of the president's judicial nominees by Senate Democrats since Bush has been in office, it is by no means certain the confirmation process can be wrapped up by that time.
"To submit to the obstruction of a minority of senators and leave this court with a seat empty could mean several 4-4 decisions," notes Coalition president Kay Daly. "Make no mistake -- this is a historic moment for this president and for this nation."
Daly's organization points out that "every justice matters" on the high court. Justices often change their minds based on their colleagues' insights, says the Coalition -- and upcoming issues expected to be addressed by the Supreme Court deserve the full range of views, the group adds.
Then there is the obvious: an eight-member Supreme Court might split on a 4-4 decision -- keeping a lower-court's decision in place. "We do not want the litigants to wonder whether the outcome of their case would have been different if the court had been fully staffed," states the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary's website.
The group contends that allowing lower-court decisions to stand could lead to a "patchwork of law" across the country, with Constitutional rights and protections varying widely from state to state.
