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• "The next president will get one or two Supreme Court nominees. That's how close Roe v. Wade is," Biden said. He went on to predict that Romney, if elected, would appoint justices like Scalia who would vote to "outlaw abortion."
• Ryan asked whether Obama imposed a "litmus test" on his Supreme Court choices, by which he meant whether Obama had required Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor to offer assurances of their commitments to abortion rights before he nominated them to the high court. Biden said there was no such test. "We picked people who had an open mind, did not come with an agenda," he said.
• The discussion ended there.
• Conservative and liberal interest groups have been pressing the candidates to talk more about the court with the argument that just one retirement could move the court decidedly left or right.
• "We might wind up with the first true conservative majority since the 1930s," said Curt Levey of the conservative Committee for Justice. Or, "the most liberal court since the (Earl) Warren era" in the 1950s and 1960s.
• Nan Aron, president of the liberal Alliance for Justice, said the next appointment "could change the course of the court and the nation, not just for four years but for 40."
• Still, the last time the Supreme Court was a real campaign issue was Richard Nixon's law-and-order campaign in 1968. In that year of antiwar protests and political assassinations, Nixon criticized the Supreme Court, then led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, for rulings in favor of criminal suspects that "effectively shielded hundreds of criminals from punishment."
• In that era, the Warren Court -- though led by a chief justice who was a former Republican governor of California and vice presidential nominee -- was decidedly liberal and Nixon's attack on it fit with the thrust of his campaign, which included reaching out for support from conservative Southern Democrats upset with the high court over its civil rights rulings.
• But social issues have not played as large a role in 2012 as they did in 1968. The focus on the economy has left little room for anything else.
• Even so, several hot-button issues are before the court this term. The justices already are weighing the future of affirmative action in college admissions and could take up momentous cases involving gay marriage and a cornerstone of civil rights law.
• ___
• Justice Samuel Alito took no part in the Supreme Court's rejection this week of appeals in cases involving Chevron Corp. and the nation's largest telecommunica

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