COLUMN LEFT : Now, a Lever to Move the Political World : If Souter helps to overturn Roe vs. Wade, the political fallout will bury Republicans.

There is one and only one question that really matters in the whole Supreme Court brouhaha, and it matters more to the long-term electoral prospects of George Bush and the Republican Party than it does to the short-term question of whether David H. Souter will be confirmed: Will Souter be the swing vote on the Supreme Court that once and for all reverses Roe vs. Wade, the decision that established a constitutional right to abortion, and if so, when?

No one expects that Souter’s confirmation hearings will be characterized by the intensity that surrounded Robert Bork’s confirmation hearings. The defeat of Bork’s nomination by Ronald Reagan to the court was the only really important liberal victory in a decade almost completely devoid of such victories, and it took place in a different world, a world in which the abortion question was still within the judicial system.

Last summer, in the so-called Webster case, the court gave the states some power to limit abortion and thus made the question of a politician’s stand on the issue an important voting issue. Those who want to keep abortion legal found an intensity of support that surprised even them. And Democrats, beginning to despair that anything would ever go their way again, found a new lease on life.

Having discovered that the pro-choice position wins in the electoral arena, the Democrats are making the Souter confirmation hearing part of a larger political strategy.

Abortion could be, quite simply, the horse that Democrats ride back to power--especially if Roe vs. Wade is overturned before the 1992 presidential election. The sense of political opportunity is so strong in the air that in some quarters the confirmation process is being viewed as a place to lay down the markers for the 1990 and 1992 elections.

David Souter will be asked about abortion in every conceivable way. He will certainly try to avoid direct answers to questions about specific cases and he will attempt to walk the delicate line between displeasing the rightists who oppose abortion and raising the red flag for whose who hope to keep abortion legal.

Nevertheless, he cannot avoid answering questions about his general view of the right to privacy--an often-disputed “penumbra” of the Constitution--from which the abortion-rights cases take their legitimacy. And his answers to these questions, no matter how clever or obscure, will eventually form a record that will come back to haunt every politician from George Bush to the senators who vote to confirm him, if and when Souter becomes the swing vote to overturn Roe vs. Wade.

In the first week of October, just as voters are beginning to focus on the Nov. 6 midterm elections, the Supreme Court, which will probably contain a Justice Souter, will meet and decide which cases to hear. There are already enough votes on the court to grant review to a case challenging Roe; the addition of Souter will mean that there could be enough votes to win a case overturning Roe. If the justices choose to hear an abortion case that could directly challenge Roe vs. Wade, or if they decide to reach the privacy issue in a case already before them, the abortion issue will dominate the midterm elections during the most critical time.

This would be good news for pro-choice Democrats in the fall--especially for Dianne Feinstein, the nominee for governor of California; Ann Richards, the nominee for governor of Texas, and Lawton Chiles, the probable nominee for governor of Florida. Their wins would mean Democratic victories in the three big states that will gain the most new seats in the House of Representatives.

But losing the chance to redistrict the House of Representatives for the next decade is not the end of the possible bad news for Republicans. It is entirely likely that Roe vs. Wade could be overturned in one of the court’s sessions after this fall and before to the 1992 presidential election. The blame will fall fully on the shoulders of President George Bush.

The Webster decision mobilized women sufficiently to elect the first black Democratic governor in a heavily Republican Southern state (Virginia). This after a decision that not only did not end legal abortion, but merely gave states the right to place some limits on abortion. A reversal of Roe vs. Wade in time for the 1992 presidential election could turn the political world upside down in even more dramatic ways and end Republican domination of presidential elections.