Another presidential race is underway and, like always, there is almost no discussion about whom the candidates would appoint to the Supreme Court. This is like a couple deciding to have children without setting aside any room in the house for a crib. For those of us who care about civil liberties, there is nothing more important than the Supreme Court.

If you want to protect and advance the cause of civil liberties, don't look to our elected offcials or the President for this. No one will ever get elected to any position of authority on a civil liberties platform. That would mean advancing the rights of criminal defendants, prisoners, unpopular or minority religions, political dissenters and others who neither fit within the conformist politics of American society nor bottom feed with the lowest common denominator.

There has been much hand-wringing among liberal Supreme Court watchers about the direction the Court is taking. There is no longer any balance. Only two Democrats have been appointed to the Supreme Court in 40 years. The last and best place to preserve and protect the civil liberties outlned in the U.S. Constitution lies with the Supreme Court. But the Court over the last few years has veered further to the right than anyone predicted, as the subliterate clown in the White House has already made two lifetime appointments to the Court.

There is very little talk about this, but I'm telling you right now. It will be a political bloodbath when the oldest Justice on the Court, John Paul Stevens decides to retire or dies. This will happen relatively quickly. Stevens is 87 years old and has sat on the Court for 32 years. He is regarded as a liberal these days, but that is only because this conservative is nowhere nearly as conservative as the others on the Court. I do not care for everything Stevens has done on the Court, but I would take him over everyone else. This week's New York Times Magazine offers a comprehensive personality profile of Stevens, who for some reason spoke openly with a reporter, something the reclusive Supreme Court justices rarely do.

The article tells us how far we have moved away from viewing the Supreme Court as the true guardian of American civil libertes. Stevens issued a foreful dissening opinion this Spring as the Supreme Court struck down a measure used by many school districts to ensure integrated schools, i.e., making sure that racial diversity exists in the schools to help prepare students for the real world. Years ago, in the famous Brown v. Board of Education case, the Supreme Court made it illegal for school districts to keep the black kids away from the white kids, ruling that "separate but equal is not equal" under American law. This ruling, of course, applied the principle that the government cannot discriminate against students on the basis of race.

In the current educational environment, where school districts were bringing together black and white students, the districts were not doing anything inherently discriminatory and these policies did not stem from any racist views of inferiority. But in June 2007, the Supreme Court assumed that any educational decisions based on race are illegal, even if the policy creates no victims and does not have the effect of shutting students out of good schools. The current Supreme Court's simplistic views on racial policies and classifications outraged Justice Stevens, a grandfatherly type who is not prone to hyperbole. But he issued a statement in his dissenting opinion that will stand as a epitaph for the current civil rights environment: "It is my firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision."

A voice like this will not be on the Supreme Court forever. God help us if a Bush-clone appoints the replacement when Stevens leaves the Court. Why is this not an issue on the campaign trail?