Bush and the Courts

Abstract

For better or worse, Ronald Reagan’s impact on the federal judiciary and trends in constitutional law promise to be his presidency’s most enduring legacy. Campaigning for a first term in 1980, Reagan refined and expanded Richard M. Nixon’s ‘southern strategy’ — opposing court-ordered school busing, favoring tax exemptions for segregated schools, and pursuing related avenues to the souls and votes of disgrunded southern whites. In fact, Reagan opened his fall campaign in Neshoba County, Mississippi, site of the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers by Klansmen and local police, with a searing attack on federal meddling in state and local law enforcement. Nor were his appeals to the disenchanted confined to southern segregationists. For the religious right, the non-churchgoing former actor proclaimed his opposition to abortion and pornography, support for school prayer, and devotion to the nation’s Judaeo-Christian heritage. For those concerned about rising crime and social programs, he scorned criminal-coddling judges and welfare ‘chiselers’. For those convinced that minorities were the chief cause of the nation’s social problems, he offered coded appeals, assuring one audience, for example, that he too was offended by the sight of able-bodied, foodstamp-wielding ‘bucks’ in supermarket check-out lines.