Help, Help Us, Arlen!

Specter could be the left's only hope in the looming Supreme Court melee.

by Doron Taussig

Apocalyptic predictions. Hyperbolic metaphors. Advertising blitzes that would make the folks at Cialis blush. By now, you've heard that interest groups on both the left and right are gearing up for a campaign of epic proportions over the Supreme Court vacancy created by Sandra Day O'Connor's retirement. But amidst all the excitement, an awkward question hangs silently in the air: With both the presidency and the Senate in Republican hands, and no elections before the nominee is picked, does the left actually expect its efforts to matter?

Faced with this query, local liberals turn to a common source for hope. It is their one tiny beacon in a dark political night, an opportunity so solitary that they invoke it with a single word: "Arlen."

Pennsylvania's U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, who played a central role in the rejection of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and the confirmation of Justice Clarence Thomas, is a pro-choice, moderate Republican, and will preside over hearings for President Bush's nominee as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He didn't come into this position easily. Specter, who is 75 years old and serving his fifth six-year term in the Senate, faced down a tough primary challenge in last year's election and then met opposition from conservative groups in his bid for the Judiciary chairmanship. After fighting off these attacks from the right, the senator now turns around to find the left pleading for his mercy.

"He's the only hope that we have," says Judy Husbands, a Center City resident and member of the left-wing political advocacy group MoveOn.

Last Tuesday, Planned Parenthood of Southeast Pennsylvania held a protest outside of Specter's Philadelphia office. On Wednesday, approximately 50 members of Philly for Change met at a bar, took out their cell phones and filled the senator's voicemail with pleas for moderation. Over the weekend, members of MoveOn gathered at house parties to organize "emergency response teams," which will hit the streets and collect petitions to present to Specter and other senators if the president nominates "a right-wing extremist." (No definition of "extremist" was provided, but, according to one woman at a Center City MoveOn party, "It's like pornography. You'll know it when you see it.")

Other left-leaning activists identify Specter as the focus of their efforts as well. But in the process of gaining his appointment to chair the Judiciary Committee, Specter promised to get a Bush nominee to a floor vote. What exactly do these activists expect the senator to do?

"Once you get to [a nomination], it's pretty hard to stop the train," concedes Melissa Weiler Gerber, executive director of Women's Way, a local women's rights organization. But it's "not impossible," she says, if the confirmation hearing is thorough. "We need to make sure the tough questions are asked."

As evidence of the fact that activists still stand a chance, Philly for Change's Anne Dicker points to the stalled nomination of John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and to the successful evasion of the Republicans' threat to "go nuclear" on judicial appointments by changing the rules of the filibuster.

Though Specter supported Bolton, he also helped craft a compromise on the filibuster matter. Dicker believes Specter may be persuaded to show his moderate side again because he "is now looking to his legacy as a moderate senator, and listening to people in Pennsylvania."

Specter's office did not respond to questions about the additional attention. But it's a fair bet that even if the senator were to clearly signal his intention to do the president's bidding, the activists would keep calling him, keep writing him, keep searching for some glimmer of hope. In the end, says Weiler Gerber, "We just need to really make sure that this doesn't go through without a fight."

The Real Roe v. Wade Story

Retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor cast the Supreme Court's swing vote on cases involving affirmative action, school vouchers, capital punishment and the election of George W. Bush. One issue on which she was not a tiebreaker was abortion. O'Connor has been one of six justices who support abortion rights and, more specifically, Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that made abortion legal. Nevertheless, with O'Connor's retirement bringing abortion law to the nation's mind, it's a good time to review what would happen, legally, if Roe were overturned.

It is often assumed that without Roe, abortion would be illegal in the United States. This is not so. Roe says that laws against abortion violate a constitutional right to privacy. Were there no Roe, the business of determining abortion's legality would fall to the states, some of which already have laws anticipating this scenario.

Pennsylvania has language in its state code, added in 1982, stating that whenever legally possible, state law "shall be construed so as to extend to the unborn the equal protection of the laws." However, says Helena Silverstein, a professor of government and law at Lafayette University, nothing is set in stone. Any law activated by a reversal would get tossed into state courts and battled out there. A reversal would be just another beginning, not an end.