Bush's Supreme Challenge

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So what's the problem with unassuming Al? Pro-life advocates believe that if the right jurist replaces either O'Connor or Stevens, the court will finally have a chance to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that established the right to have an abortion. Though Gonzales' views on the matter are not known, opponents cite his vote — and the concurring opinion he wrote — as a Texas Supreme Court judge allowing a girl to use a bypass provision of a state parental notification to get an abortion. "Pro-life conservatives will oppose him for that," says Terry Jeffrey, editor of Human Events, a conservative magazine.

Gonzales opponents also see the White House counsel as having a hidden hand in what they regard as the President's too soft position on the Michigan affirmative-action case. For that case, the White House filed a Supreme Court brief opposing the University of Michigan's admissions program but did not push to end affirmative action outright. And Gonzales did not help himself with a speech to a group of Evangelical leaders last year in which he did not strongly call for reversing Roe. The rock ribbed just find him squishy. "He is the counsel to a conservative President rather than a conservative counsel to the President," says Clint Bolick, vice president of the libertarian Institute for Justice.

The judge's defenders argue that he has had a strong hand in many issues that have pleased the Republican base: the order setting up military tribunals to try suspected terrorists, the fight with Congress over releasing information about Dick Cheney's energy task force and ending the American Bar Association's role in rating potential judicial nominees. More important, they point out, he's not a legal activist but a strict constructionist — one of the sacred judicial tenets of conservatives. "He was ruling on the existing statute, not legislating," a conservative Washington lawyer says of the Texas abortion ruling. "We've complained about legislating from the bench for years. We can't now start doing it ourselves." On affirmative action, top White House aides say Gonzales was not pushing his own views but finding the legal rationale for what the President believes, which is that race should be a factor in hiring but not the deciding one. It's a rule Bush believes he applied to Gonzales back in 1995 for the first of four jobs that Bush has given him. "Of course it mattered what his ethnicity is," said Bush when he appointed Gonzales to the Texas Supreme Court, "but first and foremost, what mattered is, I've got great confidence in Al. I know him well. He's a good friend."

Gonzales' resume isn't going to provide much fodder for conservatives — or liberals, for that matter — looking to deep-six Bush's close ally. He was a pro-business jurist in Texas for two years but no ideologue on social issues. He spent 13 years at Enron's law firm, Vinson & Elkins, doing deals in the go-go Houston of the 1980s but before the controversial Enron transactions took place. He was generally known as a stick-to-the-law kind of attorney in Bush's office. "Very seldom, if ever, did I hear his personal views on issues," said Terral Smith, who worked with Gonzales in Austin. "He was very careful in staff meetings to stay within the law."

Why should conservative dissent worry a President who is so wildly popular with members of his party? If the President isn't good enough for them, what are they going to do — sign on with Howard Dean? The answer is simple — and plenty scary for the White House. "We'll stay home," says Schlafly.

That is not an idle threat. Since arriving in Washington, political adviser Karl Rove has pointed out that 4 million Evangelicals who voted for Republicans in the G.O.P. congressional rout of 1994 stayed home in 2000, contributing to the closest election in modern history. Bush's displays of faith have brought many of those voters back into the fold, but they are still alert for an apostasy. Rove also wants to attract Hispanic voters. In the case of a Gonzales nomination, his two aims could clash.

Ultimately, what Gonzales has going for him is that Bush has looked him in the eye for years and liked what he has seen. He also seems to like what his support for Gonzales seems to say about himself: that the aristocratic President is an egalitarian guy capable of rewarding up-by-the-bootstraps achievement. All this may be important enough to Bush that he's willing to take some political heat for his loyal pal, whose life story he cited in his second inaugural address as Governor of Texas. "I think of my friend Al Gonzales, recently sworn in as a supreme-court justice," Bush said back in 1999. "His parents reared eight children in a two-bedroom house in Houston. They sacrificed so that their children would have a chance to succeed. Al Gonzales has realized their dream." They are words one can imagine hearing again this summer in the Rose Garden if Bush decides to make another dream come true.