http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/weekinreview/08greenhouse.html?ex=1184558400&en=7fd2d7f617ca302d&ei=5065&partner=MYWAYOn the Wrong Side of 5 to 4, Liberals Talk Tactics
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
Published: July 8, 2007
IN the old Shel Silverstein cartoon, two inmates stand side by side, spread-eagled and shackled hand and foot to the wall of a windowless and impossibly tall prison cell. One turns his head and says to the other, hopefully: “Now here’s my plan.”
Liberals talking about the Supreme Court in recent days are a bit like those cellmates — both in the dire nature of their plight, now that the conservative victory at the court has revealed itself in full dimension, and in their belief that there must be something they can do about it.
Political activists within the liberal camp came up with a plan quickly enough: to “take back the court,” in the words of Norman Lear, a founder of People for the American Way, which sent 400,000 e-mail messages last week as part of a campaign to make the court a central issue in the 2008 Senate and presidential elections.
In mid-June, before the final flood of decisions but after the court voted 5 to 4 to uphold the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation mailed an appeal in envelopes with a line from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissenting opinion in that case, her complaint about the majority’s resurrection of “ancient notions about women’s place.”
Such efforts may help raise money and win elections, but the chance that they will actually change the court, in the near or medium term, is remote. Even if the Democrats win the White House and hold the Senate, the court’s demographics are likely to trump politics. The average age of the four more liberal justices is 74; the five conservatives average a youthful (for federal judges) 61, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. the youngest at 52.
Confronting that reality, some liberal legal scholars suggest that beyond political tactics, what the left urgently needs is a long-term strategy built around an affirmative message of what the Constitution means and what the enterprise of constitutional interpretation should be about.
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