The long shadow of Casey hangs over the court's reaffirmation of Miranda in Monday's Dickerson vs. Virginia, too, though for reasons that may be less obvious. When back in 1992 O'Connor, Kennedy and Souter together wrote the opinion reaffirming "the central holding" of Roe vs. Wade, they argued, among other things, that abortion rights should stand because they had become so inextricably woven into the fabric of everyday life.

So too this week with Miranda: Rehnquist, who has spent most of his career trying to shred the kind of protections for criminal defendants represented by Miranda, wrote this week that "you have the right to remain silent" has become too deeply embedded in policing and American culture to justify overturning.

Yet -- as the Casey ruling did with abortion -- Rehnquist defended past and future "refinements" that reduce "the impact of the Miranda rule on legitimate law enforcement" -- suggesting that other such "refinements" may yet pass muster. In other words, the long debate about crime and punishment -- which has never been more intense than in this election year, with an epidemic of false-conviction and police-misconduct stories from Los Angeles to New York troubling the public conscience -- will only grow more intense in coming Supreme Court terms.

Though the next president will likely choose three justices, the party and ideology of presidents is not always an accurate guide to how they will shape the court. Souter was nominated by George W. Bush's father as a "stealth nominee" who could get conservatism past a Democratic Senate which had already rejected the higher-profile Robert Bork. He was a friend of John Sununu, the arch-conservative chief of staff in the Bush White House. Yet on the court, he was taken under the wing of Bill of Rights champion William Brennan (an Eisenhower nominee). Souter has inherited the Brennan mantle as the court's most reliable civil libertarian, on no issue more clearly so than reproductive rights.

But among recent nominees, Souter is the exception. The nomination process has become increasingly polarized beginning in the 1960s, when Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., fought the nomination of pro-civil-rights lawyer Abe Fortas, and accelerated under Reagan, the first president to explicitly use Supreme Court appointments to advance a conservative agenda. Few nominees offer a surprise like Souter. Instead most are thoroughly consistent with their roots.

Some African-American defenders of Clarence Thomas' nomination, for instance, hoped he would throw off his Reaganite mantle and grow into a sympathetic embrace of civil rights. Instead he has backed only further into the court's rightward fringe, voting most often with ardent conservative Scalia. On the other hand, Clinton nominees Ginsburg and Breyer are each, in their way, classically Clintonian -- Ginsburg's feminism offset by sometimes punitive views on criminal justice; Breyer a liberal technocrat who is never happier than when building arguments on the fine points of telecommunications regulation or (as in today's majority opinion) medical procedure.

It all means the "emotional uproar" represented by the Supreme Court's future has just entered the presidential race, in a big way. This week's decisions have made abortion rights, and the Supreme Court in general, the sleeper issues of the summer.

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