Abstract

Editorials

This article presents information on political conditions of the U.S. Doctrinal divisions in the Catholic Church have rent empires and convulsed kingdoms because they have usually involved struggles for power that go beyond arguments about doctrine. The defeat of Rose Bird as Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court could be regarded as no less than inevitable in a state whose highest claim to national respect was Rose Bird. The voters who threw out Chief Justice Bird were not throwing her out merely in California. They were threatening judges like her, who are embarrassingly few in a nation dedicated to the sanctity of the individual everywhere in the land. As the tidal wave of Democratic Senate victories crashed over them on election night, the political commentators and network analysts who for years, had been telling theft captive audiences that the Teflon President was on the verge of a sweeping triumph that would cement the GOP's position for a generation suddenly had to come up with a new line. The new Democrats, the analysts claimed, did not differ greatly from the old Republicans; they represented a "Post-New Deal" Democratic Party.