The other shoe dropped last week. Senator McCain appeared before a group of students at Wake Forest and vowed to appoint judges “strictly faithful to the Constitution’’ who would not engage in “the common and systemic abuse of our federal courts.” As The New York Times noted, “The issue is of enormous importance to conservatives, who have rallied against what they call activist judges who they say decide cases based on their personal beliefs rather than the law.’’
The likelihood is that the next president is going to appoint one or more justices to the Court. Justice Stevens is nearing 90, and Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg isn’t any spring chicken, either. The appointments of Justices Roberts and Alito put conservatives one vote away from overturning Roe v. Wade. That would assure two things: first, that the states will create a hodgepodge of abortion laws, meaning that in many states, there will be a return to back-alley abortions; and second, arguing about abortion will assert itself as one of the most intense issues on the political agenda, eclipsing all the complex questions now contending for our attention.
This was the other shoe. The first shoe came in March, when the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff testified before Congress that the U.S military did not have adequate manpower to maintain our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan as presently constituted. What’s the solution to that? The draft.
It’s interesting that Grover Norquist and other Republican activists have long expressed the desire to take America back to pre-New Deal days. Electing McCain would accomplish half the trip—a return to those ugly, contentious, rancorous days of the late sixties and early seventies, when the draft and abortion split the nation.