Free Republic

A few weeks before the Republican convention, Time magazine asked Sarah Palin what her religion was. "Christian," she said. Asked whether she was any particular kind of Christian, she replied, "No. Bible-believing Christian." Ever since John McCain asked Palin to be his running mate, her religion has been high on the list of subjects journalists have pursued. Although Palin herself hasn't brought it up and has mostly declined to be interviewed on the matter, it is already clear that her religious background contains material unfamiliar to media and political elites. Few politicians at Palin's level describe themselves as Bible-believing Christians....

The Supreme Court ended its term this year by making a mistake in one of its most controversial cases--the case in which it held unconstitutional a Louisiana law authorizing capital punishment for the rape of a child under 12 years of age.

As he has throughout the year, Huckabee grounds his pro-life position in the Declaration's recognition of the inalienable right to life. But now, in the heat of the campaign, with the Iowa caucuses just days away, he also uses the Declaration to argue that, in light of its recognition that all men are created equal, any man (or woman) can become president. Even someone like him, the son of working class parents in Hope, Arkansas, the first in his "entire male lineage" to graduate from high school, much less go to college. He put himself through college in just "two...

Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas considers a run for president. So why is he spending a night in prison? On the last day of May, at 5:30 P.M., Building 5 of the Ellsworth Correctional Facility is filled with joyful noise. More than 200 prisoners--roughly a quarter of the inmates at this state prison--have gathered for the midweek worship service. They're taking part in a program run by InnerChange Freedom Initiative, an affiliate of Prison Fellowship, its purpose being to effect such change in the heart of a prisoner that he will, upon release, go and commit crime no more. The...

JOHN ROBERTS HAS SAT IN the center seat of the Supreme Court a mere five months. Conventional wisdom holds that it takes four or five years for a new justice to hit his stride. Even so, Roberts's work stands out in a Washington whose daily manufacture, it seems, is another fight between an irresponsible Congress and a president with cratering job-approval numbers. If you want to see excellence in government, consider the brief tenure of our new chief justice.Under Roberts the Court has decided 39 cases. Roberts himself has written three opinions. Each was unanimous, the most recent being last...

WITH SAMUEL ALITO ABOUT to be confirmed, it's time to take stock of this particular episode in the making of a justice, the nation's 110th. Bear in mind that Alito was not President Bush's first choice to succeed Sandra Day O'Connor. The estimable John Roberts was, but when Chief Justice William Rehnquist died, Bush decided to redesignate Roberts for the center seat. That meant finding another nominee for O'Connor's seat.As it happened, Bush surprised the world by naming White House Counsel Harriet Miers. The Miers nomination proved a major blunder. Bush had opted for a person he knew well who...

ABOUT THE ALITO HEARINGS, one thing is certain: If it had been the Concerned Alumni of Princeton that was up for confirmation, the nomination wouldn't even make it out of the Judiciary Committee. Democrats led by Sen. Edward Kennedy portrayed CAP as hostile to minorities and to coeducation and thus to women. And Republicans weren't about to get into a fight over CAP, which was formed in 1972, shortly after Princeton went coeducational and the same year Samuel Alito graduated. CAP went out of business in 1986.CAP drew the interest of committee Democrats because Alito once identified himself as a...

Any assessment of the prospects for the Alito nomination must begin with the fact that Republicans hold the Senate. That matters-a lot. Under the Constitution the president and the Senate play the key roles in Supreme Court appointments. Simply put, the president nominates and the Senate approves-or fails to approve-the nominee. It makes sense to think that when members of the same party control both the White House and the Senate, a Supreme Court nomination is likely to succeed. And the history of Supreme Court nominations backs that up. David Brady, a professor of political science at Stanford and deputy...

THE OUTLOOK FOR THE ALITO nomination remains favorable. Even so, there is this short essay Sam Alito wrote in 1985. Senate Democrats and their political and media allies don't like it. Indeed, they think it may provide kindling that will feed a flame that they can blow into a fire mighty enough to consume the nomination. Because the essay is likely to stimulate the toughest questions Alito will hear when he appears before the Judiciary Committee in January, it's worth a close look. Twenty years ago Alito was wrapping up his fourth year briefing and arguing cases in the Supreme...

WELL, THAT'S MORE LIKE IT. In Judge Sam Alito, President Bush has chosen a more plausible High Court nominee. Make that a much more plausible nominee. His legal qualifications are exceptional, his character widely attested. And having spent 15 years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, he has demonstrated an approach to judging that clearly identifies him as a judicial conservative. Two points are worth noting on day one of this nomination. The first is Alito's legal experience. His many years on the Third Circuit mean that he knows the labor of an appellate judge,...

It was early on the first Monday in October, two hours before the Supreme Court heard its first case of the new term, that President Bush announced the nomination of Harriet Miers to succeed Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. That evening, James Dobson, the founder and chairman of Focus on the Family, a vast evangelical ministry based in Colorado Springs, came out strongly in favor of the choice. On Fox News, Dobson conceded he hadn't met Miers, but said he could support her nomination because the president had appointed high-quality judges and thus could be trusted to make another good choice....

ON THE FINAL DAY OF the Roberts hearings, Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois tried one last time: "If you've made one point many times over . . . the course of the last three days," he told the judge, "it is that as a judge you will be loyal and faithful to the process of law, to the rule of law." But "beyond loyalty to the process of law," he asked Roberts, "how do you view [the] law when it comes to expanding our personal freedom? . . . That's what I've been asking." And so, in various ways,...

Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney ponders a presidential bid.YOU REMEMBER, OR PERHAPS you don't, Sen. Orrin Hatch's 2000 presidential campaign. The senator talks about it in soft inflections, recalling this event and that debate. But especially he talks about what motivated him to run. Hatch, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, cites polling data from 1999 suggesting that 17 percent of Americans wouldn't vote for a Mormon for president under any circumstances. "One reason I ran was to knock down the prejudicial wall that exists" against Mormons, he says. "I wanted to make it easier for...

It’s premature to write an obituary, but there’s no question that America’s news media — the newspapers, newsmagazines, and television networks that people once turned to for all their news — are experiencing what psychologists might call a major life passage. They’ve seen their audiences shrink, they’ve had to worry about vigorous new competitors, and they’ve suffered more than a few self-inflicted wounds — scandals of their own making. They know that more and more people have lost confidence in what they do. To many Americans, today’s newspaper is irrelevant, and network news is as compelling as whatever is being...

THE SUPREME COURT OUGHT TO uphold the several displays of the Ten Commandments on government property whose constitutionality it considered last week. But how might it do that? If the Court had a sense of humor, perhaps it would sustain the displays (the cases are from Texas and Kentucky) by observing that the Decalogue is foreign law, and that foreign law is always good law, often even better than our own. Think of the opinion that could be crafted, perhaps by Justice Anthony Kennedy, who last week cited developments in foreign law in declaring that the Constitution condemns capital punishment...

No political bias – none at all. So says the independent panel that CBS News asked to find out what went wrong with its infamous 60 Minutes broadcast concerning George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard. "The panel," says its 224-page report, "cannot conclude that a political agenda at 60 Minutes drove the ... segment." Why not? Certainly the panel could have drawn that conclusion had it uncovered "smoking gun" evidence – such as an anti-Bush or pro-John Kerry e-mail written by, say, the producer, Mary Mapes. Or if it had found evidence of an agenda in...

MICHAEL GERSON deserves extra pay, or something, for agreeing to spend half a day earlier this month discussing with journalists a subject of some controversy--"Religion, Rhetoric, and the Presidency." If anyone was qualified for such a task, it was Gerson. He is President Bush's chief speechwriter, knows the president's mind better than anyone else in the White House (save perhaps Karl Rove) and--no small thing--shares the president's faith. Gerson, the White House's resident intellectual, is a graduate of Wheaton College, where he majored in theology. He opened the discussion--part of a conference on religion and politics sponsored by the Ethics...

YES, the president must get this decision right. He must take real care with the nomination of a new Supreme Court justice. He must name someone impressive who shares his judicial philosophy. And he must get that nominee confirmed.It's important to say this now because the likelihood of a vacancy by the end of the current term or earlier, perhaps even next month, has markedly increased with the news that Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who is 80 and has served since 1971, has thyroid cancer and is undergoing both radiation treatment and chemotherapy.Other justices may well also retire during Bush's...

What the 2004 election election means for the judiciary. New York I WENT TO A DEBATE yesterday at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square where the people you most wanted to hear from weren't on the program. The subject was the vexed one of the nomination and confirmation of judges, and Boyden Gray and Victoria Toensing, both lawyers in private practice in Washington, argued from a pro-Bush, Republican perspective. Nan Aron of the Alliance for Justice and Betsy Cavendish of NARAL Pro-Choice America from the point of view of the Democratic minority in the Senate. As everyone knows, Senate Democrats...

DURING THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION the Wesley Theological Seminary (in Washington, D.C.) sponsored a discussion of "Red God, Blue God: The God Gap in Presidential Politics: Is It Real?" So it was only fitting, since Democrats are on one end of that gap and Republicans on the other, for the seminary to host another confab in Gotham during the GOP convention. Mike McCurry, Bill Clinton's best press secretary, moderated a discussion at WNET Channel 13 (not far from Madison Square Garden) among Shaun Casey of Wesley Seminary, Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and John Podesta, a Clinton...