Gary Bauer may be a booger-eating Moonie, but he is 100% correct here:
The stakes are as high as ever. I still encounter conservatives disillusioned with politics or still angry that their candidate didn’t win the presidential nomination. They often want me to give them one good reason to vote in this election. My response: Judges.
Judges matter for several reasons. Six of the Supreme Court’s nine justices will be 69 years old or older on Inauguration Day 2009, including all five of the court's left-leaning members. Court watchers predict that the next president will appoint at least two justices.
Also, the average tenure of Supreme Court justices since 1970 is 26 years. While presidents remain in office for four or eight years, Supreme Court appointees have the opportunity to shape our laws for a generation or more. And they have. Conservatives rightly complain about judges who wield raw political power to redefine our most basic values. It’s the only way the Left can succeed. Since it cannot achieve its goals through the democratic process via elected legislatures it shrugs off the people and goes to the courts, where it relies on political activists cloaked in black who answer to no one. So many core issues today, from the sanctity of human life and definition of marriage to our religious freedoms, are determined by the courts.
He's right.
You are not his intended audience. He's speaking to lukewarm Republicans. But he's right, dammit, and we all need to carry his message to social moderates and undecideds and low-info voters.
If you take Roe v. Wade for granted, stop. It is gravely imperiled by this Republican ticket.
If you take the progress of women, minorities, LGBT and the disabled in the workplace for granted, stop, because as sure as I'm born, the Supreme Court will hear discrimination cases in the next eight years and beyond. The "invisible hand of the free market" isn't the law of our land yet, but "yet" is the operative word.
If your kids are in school and you take their secular curriculum for granted, stop.
If spying and snooping and domestic wiretapping without warrants doesn't make you worry, start worrying. It doesn't matter if you have anything to hide; a Supreme Court tilted in favor of these kinds of practices ensures they'll find something, or manufacture it.
It's time to take this seriously. If you aren't talking to at least one undecided voter a day -- whether at work or at church or on the phonebanks -- you need to start. Commit yourself to it, and be the expert these voters need. They might be hard to find, but they are waiting to hear from you.
Our most cherished freedoms are at stake -- and that's no exaggeration.