But like a lot of people I talk to, especially those contemplating a vote for Nader, I am also vexed by a nagging voice in my head, which keeps articulating two words over and over: Supreme Court. Supreme Court. Supreme Court.

Since midsummer, Nader's partisans have been working overtime to persuade us that this nagging voice is just a Democratic tout. It has become a sort of orthodoxy to dismiss fears about the Supreme Court and the threat of an anti-choice majority as a quadrennial scare tactic to keep voters in line. "Roe v. Wade was written by a Republican, and upheld for 27 years by Republicans," Michael Moore reassures voters on his Web site. "The Supreme Court gets dragged out every four years to squash any attempt to escape the Democratic Party," writes Barbara Ehrenreich in the Nation, where my friend Christopher Hitchens argues the same case: "It is as possible, in theory as well as practice, to imagine Gore making a safe and stupid reactionary appointment as it is to picture Bush making an 'unpredictable' centrist one."

These writers and other friends are all clamoring for a no-regrets Nader vote by pointing to the less-than-predictable biographies of justices past. Irrefutable: Roe vs. Wade was written by Richard Nixon-appointed Justice Harry Blackmun; Ronald Reagan-appointed Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is pro-choice; the Supreme Court nominees of Republican presidents have sometimes turned into civil libertarian heroes, among them Blackmun, the great Justice William Brennan and Chief Justice Earl Warren. As for Democrats, John F. Kennedy's first appointment, Byron White, turned out to be a liberal's nightmare -- opposing abortion rights, affirmative action and the Miranda ruling, supporting aid to parochial schools and upholding anti-gay sodomy statutes.

All true, as far as it goes, but I fear that is not very far. This reading of Supreme Court history ignores recent, uncomfortable facts. Since 1980 -- a legal generation longer than Warren's famously liberal tenure as chief justice -- Republican Supreme Court nominees have been anything but "unpredictable." Of seven Supreme Court justices confirmed under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, just one -- David Souter -- has systematically disappointed the right.

In fact, the political history of Supreme Court appointments neatly divides with Reagan's election in 1980. Prior to Reagan, presidents named justices for all sorts of reasons, with friendship, the settling of old debts and the elimination of prospective political rivals all as likely to figure in a nomination as ideology. One of Reagan's most significant achievements was to abandon that tradition of wink-and-nod nominations, to recognize the political potential in the Supreme Court as explicit patronage for his party's most conservative factions. For Reagan, Supreme Court seats were raw meat thrown to the religious right, anti-regulatory free-marketers and law-and-order extremists. In return for such powerful gains, right-wingers were happy to ignore Reagan's massive escalation of the national debt.

President Bush, advised by a Cabinet including Dick Cheney, cheerfully sustained Reagan's strategy. In fact, Bush's appointments were even more politicized than Reagan's. Replacing retiring African-American civil rights champion Justice Thurgood Marshall with inexperienced, ultraconservative African-American Clarence Thomas ranks as the most cynically calculating Supreme Court nomination of all time. And Souter, you'll recall, was named by Bush in the explicit hope of undoing Brennan's civil-libertarian legacy upon Brennan's retirement. That Souter instead became the lone holdout against the William Rehnquist faction's rightward tilt was simply White House miscalculation. Bush had hoped to name a star of the conservative bar, but progressives had, a few years earlier, effectively campaigned against the far-right Robert Bork. To avoid another fight Bush turned to the unknown Souter, a friend of his chief of staff from New Hampshire. It's a mistake that won't be made twice: The religious right has already begun a "No More Souters" campaign to make sure.

What about that reaffirmation of abortion rights by the Reagan-Bush court? True, in 1992 justices O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy joined Souter to secure "the central holding" of Roe vs. Wade, in Planned Parenthood of Pennsylvania vs. Casey. But Kennedy this year turned his back on his Casey colleagues to support Colorado's ban on late-term abortion -- joining ranks with Rehnquist, Thomas and Antonin Scalia, who all believe, as Thomas wrote, that Roe vs. Wade is this century's equivalent of the Dred Scott decision to uphold slavery. With three bitter anti-choice justices, one waverer and as many as three Supreme Court seats likely to open in the next term, the future of reproductive rights can hardly be called a marginal issue.

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