The importance of the Supreme Court as an election issue – which was clearly predicted by pre-election polls – made itself clear in President Obama's overwhelming victory last night. Americans recognized that Mitt Romney would have driven the Court even further to the right, and they cast their votes accordingly.

Last month, People For the American Way, the Alliance For Justice Action Campaign, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights released a poll demonstrating that the Supreme Court was not only an important issue for voters, it was one that significantly favored President Obama over Mitt Romney.

A remarkable 63 percent of voters said the issue of who will serve on the Supreme Court was an important consideration in their vote for president. By a five-point margin, voters said they trusted President Obama over Mitt Romney to nominate Supreme Court justices. President Obama had an 18-point advantage among swing voters overall and a 26-point advantage women swing voters.

The survey also explained why: What most concerned voters – a full 54 percent – was that Romney would nominate justices who would consistently favor corporations over ordinary Americans. After all, Romney very openly said that he would nominate Justices like John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito – the solid backbone of the current Corporate Court. And every corporate-funded hit job TV viewers were assaulted with just served as reminder of their handiwork and what more Justices like them would do to our country.

So it was no surprise that President Obama, Vice-President Biden, and Senators-elect Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts), Chris Murphy (Connecticut), and Mazie Hirono (Hawaii) reminded voters of the importance of the Court during the campaign.

Conservatives will try to say the election tells us nothing about the Court. Like Karl Rove on Fox News when the election was called, they will try to wish the hard numbers away, but they can't. Yesterday, the American people repudiated the conservative vision of the Supreme Court, giving President Obama a clear mandate to nominate strong progressives to restore the nation's highest court as a place where Americans can be confident in Equal Justice Under the Law.

As Election Day approaches, voters need to keep in mind one of the most important powers given to a president: the ability to nominate Supreme Court Justices. Judicial nominations take even more precedence in this election due to the fact that four current justices are in their seventies, making it likely that the next president will have the opportunity to nominate at least one or two justices, putting major progressive reforms along with a list of other issues at risk with the possibility of even one additional conservative justice to the Court. The stakes are highest for progressives because Breyer (74) and Ginsburg (79, the most likely to retire) tend to lean liberal in their decisions and a conservative-leaning replacement for either would give disproportional amounts of power to the conservative wing of the Court.

Romney has pledged to nominate individuals that align with extreme right-wing justices like Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Chief Justice John Roberts. Under the guise of securing “greater protections for economic liberty and greater scrutiny for regulation” and “judicial modesty,” a more conservative Court would ultimately limit the expansion of gay rights, further extend corporate influence in politics, attack women’s reproductive rights, and threaten the recently upheld healthcare legislation.

To understand the implications of a Supreme Court under Romney, one only needs to look at Romney’s choice of chairman of his Judicial Advisory Committee: Robert Bork, a right-wing extremist and advocator for Constitutional “originalism”, a radically conservative way to interpret the Constitution. Bork opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Roe v. Wade, and in 2007, Romney declared, “I wish he were already on the Supreme Court. He’s the kind of brilliant conservative mind that this court could use.” Clearly, Romney intends to shift the Court’s further to the right with nominations similar to Bork.

President Obama has been quite vocal regarding his opponent’s intentions with vacancies on the Supreme Court. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Obama made it clear that a Romney/Ryan administration would be in a position to overturn Roe v. Wade through the Supreme Court. In a recent appearance on the Tonight Show, President Obama again highlighted the importance of having a diverse Court especially when it came to Roe v. Wade. The President also recently emphasized the importance of the Supreme Court and marriage equality in the coming years during an interview with MTV, expressing opposition to the Defense of Marriage Act and hoping for its eventual overturning.

A more conservative Supreme Court would lead to a radical reinterpretation of the Constitution and a dramatic attack on equal opportunity and rights. If Romney is elected, this sort of Court would almost certainly become a reality.

Click for PFAW’s new report on the Court’s importance.

The ballot initiative that revoked marriage equality in California has taken a big step towards having its constitutionality determined by America’s highest court.  In a long-awaited move, proponents of Prop 8 have petitioned the Supreme Court to review the Ninth Circuit’s ruling in Hollingsworth .v Perry that the ballot initiative violated the federal Equal Protection Clause.  A nearly 500 page document, which can found here, lays out their rationale for urging the court to review the case.

Prop 8 Trial Tracker broke down the core of their argument:

The question presented in the case is: “Whether the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the State of California from defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman.” The proponents tell the Court that they should answer the “profoundly important question whether the ancient and vital institution of marriage should be fundamentally redefined to include same-sex couples.” They write that leaving the Ninth Circuit’s decision intact would have “widespread and immediate negative consequences” and would leave the impression that any “experiment” with marriage would be “irrevocable”.

The Ninth Circuit issued a very narrow ruling, avoiding the question of whether gay and lesbian couples in general have a constitutional right to marry.  Instead, it based its ruling on narrow grounds unique to California, where same-sex couples were left with all the state rights of marriage but not the name. It found that taking their designation of “marriage” while leaving their rights unchanged did not serve any of the purposes put forth by its defenders. Instead, its only purpose and effect was to lessen a targeted group’s status and dignity by reclassifying their relationship and families as inferior. While the Supreme Court will be presented with the narrower question as framed by the Ninth Circuit, it is impossible to tell, if it agrees to hear the case at all, whether they will rule on this principle or more broadly on the ability of states to deny lesbians and gays the right to marry.

The Supreme Court will likely decide in early October whether or not to hear the case.  Back in February, PFAW applauded the decision of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in upholding the decision of the district court striking down Prop 8.

Marriage equality is just one of the many critical issues that will come before the Supreme Court when they reconvene next session.  The elevation of Prop 8 to the highest level of the judicial system underscores the increasing importance of the Supreme Court and the Presidential election.

It is a difficult to imagine a more conservative Court than the one we have now, but Mitt Romney has pledged to appoint justices even further to the right then John Roberts and Samuel Alito.  Romney has also enlisted far-right judge Robert Bork to advise him on judicial matters.

Visit RomneyCourt.com  for more on Mitt Romney’s extreme vision for the Supreme Court.

First and foremost, today’s Supreme Court ruling was an extraordinarily important win for anyone who cares about healthcare. As Justice Kennedy’s dissent made clear, the Court’s most conservative members were on the verge of trashing the entire Affordable Care Act, including provisions ending discrimination because of preexisting conditions, allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ health plans, and reigning in some of the worst excesses of the insurance industry. All of that was at stake today, and the Court’s ruling will allow millions of people to receive better, more affordable health care. Hallelujah for that.

But today’s ruling also shows how dangerously extreme our Court has already become.

To be clear: there should be no question that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional. The Constitution’s text and history, bolstered by decades of precedent support the law. The fact that the nation was forced to endure a grueling legal drama over the Act’s fate says nothing about the constitutionality of the mandate itself (which has been supported by Republicans ranging from Mitt Romney to Newt Gingrich) and everything about the makeup of our federal courts. As John Cassidy pointed out yesterday at The New Yorker, the challenge to the Affordable Care Act is the result of decades of concerted work by the far Right:

Though the case against Obamacare that the Court is considering is a legal travesty, lacking in serious foundation, the moment is truly momentous. After thirty years of organizing, strategizing, and mobilizing, the conservative counter-revolution may be about to win its biggest victory yet: the striking down of a massive new government program, and, equally important, the overthrowing of a legal doctrine that Administrations of both parties have relied on for seventy years to regulate the economy.

In the wake of Roe and the Warren Court’s Civil Rights and religious liberty decisions, the Right realized that in order for its agenda to win in the Courts, it needed to change the judges. Judicial restraint aside, Conservative activists in black robes are powerful advocates for the Right’s extreme agenda, and Republicans have been relentless in placing partisan ideologues on the bench throughout the judicial system.

The four votes in favor of striking down Obamacare are a monument to that strategy and a promise of things to come. Twenty-five years after his own nomination was rejected by a bipartisan coalition, Robert Bork has a new job as Mitt Romney’s chief judicial advisor. If Romney wins in November, votes that upheld the Affordable Care Act will likely be replaced with votes to strike it down, legal niceties be damned.

Finally, it would be wrong to read this ruling—especially Justice Roberts’ portion of it—in isolation. Some supporters of the Act have been quick to applaud the Chief Justice’s vote to uphold the law, but the details of his decision and his broader agenda are profoundly disturbing. Not only does his ruling today carry frightening implications for future cases under the Commerce Clause--which undergirds a panoply of hard won progressive legislation—it says little about the issues most squarely in his sights. In voting to uphold Obamacare, Roberts paused only briefly from his ongoing gutting of laws protecting Civil Rights, women’s rights, environmental protections, clean elections and labor unions. It would be unconscionable if Roberts’ vote to uphold health care reform distracted from, say, the likelihood that he’ll eviscerate the Voting Rights Act next year.

All told, progressives shouldn’t be afraid to celebrate today’s ruling: a win is a win. But no one should forget that our Court has lurched dangerously to the right in recent years, and that if Mitt Romney achieves the White House in November, today’s narrow victory will become tomorrow’s devastating defeat.