At the opening session of this week's confirmation hearings for John G. Roberts, Jr., nominee to replace William H. Rehnquist as the Chief Justice of the United States, some Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee seemed to set themselves up to block John Roberts' nomination. Likewise, many interest groups are also moving to oppose his elevation to the Supreme Court. In opposing someone of his apparent judicial persuasion, I think that they are making a mistake. I believe that the current debate over John Roberts presents liberals in America with a chance to modify their approach to the Court in a way that will better suit their, and the country's, long-term interests.

In the past four decades liberals have very successfully tried to implement an interpretation of the Constitution that defends many of their beliefs. Not surprisingly, conservatives have not responded favorably to this development. As it is currently enforced by the judicial branch, the Constitution does not allow state or federal legislatures to prevent a woman from having an abortion, to prevent two adults from engaging in consensual sodomy or to execute people who are under the age of 18 or mentally handicapped. These results are at the top of many liberals' lists of policies that should, in some way, be supported by the government. But these policies are also those that have elicited the most energetic dissent from the right, for whom there is literally no recourse besides changing the makeup, or the minds, of the Supreme Court.

The debates over these issues would normally take place in various legislatures across the country, where term limits, regular elections and political pressures would ensure that no victory remain irreparably permanent, that there would always be room for change and debate, and that anyone who moves too far out of the mainstream would eventually lose his or her seat. Instead, the battleground for these issues has shifted to the Supreme Court. As a result, decisions regarding these questions are near permanent. Hence, the intensely fraught nomination process we are now witnessing.

I present this description of the Constitution as it now stands so that liberals such as myself can imagine what it is like to have only one extraordinarily difficult means of advancing one's policy goals. When you want to effect change in an issue that is protected by the Supreme Court, you can only do so by voting for a President who will likely nominate like-minded people to the Court; and by voting for senators who will be likely to confirm that nominee. No more direct action is open to you. Of course, it is easy for liberals to say that it is illegitimate to want, for example, to limit a woman's right to an abortion. But this dismissive response is only easy to make when you are on the winning side, a condition which in the future might no longer apply to Constitutional liberals.

The conservative response to what they perceive as judicial mischief on the part of liberals has so far been to support a more modest approach to judging. A standard conservative catchphrase regarding the judiciary is "judicial activism"; recent Republican presidents have tended to nominate judges who believe that the Constitution is neutral on key social issues like abortion and gay rights, leaving the resolution of those issues to legislative bodies.

But now, more and more, some conservatives are beginning to advocate a more aggressive jurisprudence, one that would discern within the Constitution the protection of policies favored by the right. A common form of this approach advocates a radical return to a pre-New Deal reading of the Constitution that forbids, among other things, minimum wage laws, certain federal civil rights legislation and the Environmental Protection Agency. Justice Thomas is the closest thing the current Court has to this kind of thinker, and he's moderate by comparison. Another argument of this type holds that not only does the Constitution not contain a right to choice for abortion, but that it also actually contains, in the Fourteenth Amendment, protections that apply to fetuses and therefore forbid abortion. Even Justice Scalia believes that States can decide to allow women to have abortions; were the Supreme Court to adopt the Fourteenth Amendment argument, state determination will not even be an option.

When the Supreme Court decides controversial social issues, the controversy remains. The battles become rarer, their stakes higher and the feeling of helplessness on the part of those on the losing side is more intense and longer-lived. Faced with the possibility of someday living on that side of the Court, liberals should now realize that it is in their interest to adopt the moderate, socially neutral reading of the Constitution that Judge Roberts seems to favor. The confirmation hearings now proceeding in Washington provide us with an opportunity to once again declare the Supreme Court neutral ground and continue the debate where it belongs.

Robins can be reached at srobins08@amherst.edu