The Right's Moment, Years in the Making

What Gray and others have done is fuse the GOP's economic and social conservatives, much as Bush did in his two presidential races. Gray's Committee for Justice represents business conservatives and has on its board top corporate lawyers; members of the Republican lobbying firm Barbour, Griffith & Rogers; John Engler, head of the National Association of Manufacturers; and Frank A. Keating, president of the American Council of Life Insurers.

O'Connor was pro-business in her rulings, and economic conservatives are determined to keep the seat that way in cases involving class-action lawsuits, tough enforcement of corporate-fraud laws and bankruptcy legislation -- all of which have bottom-line consequences of billions of dollars.

The financial clout of such conservatives is being paired with the grass-roots power of the social conservatives, who have been dismayed by recent rulings of the court on abortion, the Ten Commandments and other polarizing issues. The social conservatives are represented by people such as Sekulow; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; and James Dobson of Focus on the Family.

Perkins said Friday that his group "will be mobilizing over 20,000 churches" and is reaching "over a million people" daily through e-mail and the Internet.

The replacement of O'Connor with a more reliable conservative would, by itself, give conservatives a majority for the first time on church-state issues, affirmative action and such abortion issues as parental notification and what critics call "partial birth" procedures. Perhaps more significantly, it will bring the right within one vote of a solid conservative majority that could theoretically overturn the Roe v. Wade abortion ruling -- although some legal analysts say that could be years away.

Veterans of the culture wars of the past few decades see the shift of a couple of seats on the Supreme Court as the culmination of a long struggle.

"This fight has been going on for my entire adult lifetime," said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, who was first ordained in 1969, six years after the Supreme Court had barred school prayer.

Gary Bauer, of the Campaign for Working Families and a 2000 GOP presidential candidate, said: "The court is both the last holdout and the major instigator of the disturbing changes in the values arena over the last 30 years."

Miranda calls the vacancy left by O'Connor a "test case" for conservative clout and says the right will demand that any Bush nominee have a "paper trail" showing strong conservative views.

"The conservative movement is mobilized to prevent a Souter or even a Kennedy," Miranda said. And once a true conservative is nominated, he added, "The conservative movement is ready to fall on its sword for a presidential nominee, and that is in reaction to Bork."

Ralph G. Neas, who heads the liberal People for the American Way and has been involved in every confirmation battle since 1975, has grudging respect for conservatives' progress.

"They have taken efforts to enhance their organizational structure and be able to finance that structure in a way they haven't before," he said. "They're in many ways replicating what we have been doing for some time, and bringing in wads of new money through their corporate special-interest contacts. Their pockets are much deeper than ours."

The first goal of the conservatives' newfound organizational power is to pressure Bush to nominate an ideologically acceptable judicial candidate. Perkins said Bush "has committed to nominate justices like Scalia and Thomas." Rush Limbaugh, in his radio broadcast, warned that there "is no longer any room" for a "stealth" nominee without a proven conservative record.

Bush said during the 2004 presidential campaign that he admires justices such as Scalia and Clarence Thomas -- a statement that prompts Shannen W. Coffin, a former official in Bush's Justice Department, to say "there's no doubt the president made a promise" to nominate like-minded judges.

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and an adviser to Karl Rove, Bush's chief political strategist, said that starting with the election of 1968, "the left discovered it could no longer hold the presidency, so it turned to Congress for protection." After Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994, "the left turned to the courts. This is all they have left."