Fewer See Balance in Court's Decisions

Three out of four blacks disapproved of the court's ruling in the race case, as did a narrow majority of whites. Seven out of 10 Democrats disagreed with the ruling, while Republicans and independents both were evenly split.

"People really don't want to go backwards on civil rights," said Nan Aron, president of the liberal Alliance for Justice, which focuses on judicial nominations.

The increasing view of the court as more conservative than liberal, and angry rhetoric from Senate Democrats about the role of Roberts and Alito in moving the court in that direction, have energized liberal activist groups that focus on the judiciary.

People for the American Way launched a fundraising drive this month with an e-mail missive sent to 400,000 activists; in the message, Norman Lear, one of the group's founders, warned, "Only you and I stand between the new Supreme Court and the continued chiseling away at the rights and freedoms we Americans hold dear."

The group urges activists to sign online petitions to "Correct the Court" by legislatively overturning some of the court's decisions.

But activists on the right have found in recent years that their supporters are the ones for whom changing the federal judiciary has become a movement.

"It's a unifying issue in many ways for Republicans," Mueller said. For the GOP, nominating conservatives to the federal judiciary, he added, "is one of those issues that has almost become like anti-communism was during the Cold War."

Mueller and his colleague Keith Appell point to the presidential race, where, among Republican candidates, former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney have already named "justice advisory committees" for counsel on issues and nominations.

For Giuliani, a candidate seen in some Republican circles as too moderate, endorsements from conservative favorites such as former solicitor general Theodore B. Olson and Steven Calabresi, one of the founders of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization, were important.

The specter of "liberal activist judges" is still a strong rallying point for conservatives, despite the fact that, because of the Republican hold on the White House, seven of the nine justices on the Supreme Court were appointed by Republican presidents and GOP appointees are in the majority on 10 of the 13 U.S. courts of appeals.

Aron and Neas note that it was conservative anger over court decisions that fueled the right's interest in the federal courts, and they hope that this term's decisions similarly upset activists on the left. "Before, it was hypothetical," Neas said.