Confirmation Hearings for Judge Souter
In your editorial, you ask us to consider the risk of establishing “single-issue” litmus tests on judicial candidates. As was pointed out by one of the witnesses at the hearings, if the issue before the Judiciary Committee in post-Civil War times had been slavery, or Nazism after World War II, would you dismiss or trivialize such issues as “single-issue” litmus tests?
Considering the fact that this is the first time in our nation’s history that hard-fought constitutional rights are being slowly but brutally taken away, one can hardly view the areas of civil rights, rights of privacy and reproductive rights as “single-issue” litmus tests.
The covert wait-and-see attitude is hardly reassuring to those whose very lives are literally at stake.
LINDA WARD
Montebello
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