Abortion and race dominate the Supreme Court’s agenda for the term that begins tomorrow, with the Bush administration and its conservative allies urging the justices to put limits on abortion rights and affirmative action.
Conservatives want the court to uphold a 2003 federal law banning the procedure opponents call “partial-birth” abortion, and to strike down local integration policies that distribute students by race. They are asking the court not only to rule in their favor, but to limit — or, possibly, overrule — recent constitutional decisions that have drawn heavy fire from the right.
The conservative push on social issues is just what Democrats and liberals, concerned about the future of Roe v. Wade , the 1973 case that recognized a right to abortion, warned against during confirmation hearings for the two Bush appointees now on the court — Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.
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Taking up race-conscious public school assignments was a surprise, however. The justices had turned down a similar case a few months earlier, when Sandra Day O’Connor was still on the court.O’Connor wrote the court’s opinion in a 5 to 4 case upholding race-conscious admissions in higher education.
But after Alito replaced her, the court spent almost two months discussing the public school issue before deciding in June to hear it.
As the WaPo notes, both conservatives and liberals will watch the US Supreme Court’s rulings extremely closely. Conservatives, of course, hope that Bush’s decision to appoint Alito and Robert will ‘pay off’, so to speak. Some liberals, on the other hand, are afraid that these appointments will, indeed, ‘pay off’ for conservatives.
It is one of those big differences between the systems in the US and those in most of Europe: for instance in the Netherlands, much less is dependent, or considered to be less dependent on the personal beliefs of judges.
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