Frank Ricci, a firefighter in New Haven, Conn., worked hard, played by the rules, and earned a promotion to fire lieutenant. But the city denied him the promotion because he is not black. Ricci sued, along with 16 other whites and one Hispanic firefighter. After a 7-6, near-party-line vote by a federal Appeals Court to dismiss the lawsuit, the plaintiffs petitioned for Supreme Court review.

If the Court grants the petition, the now-obscure case will vault to the top of the nation’s racial policy agenda, presenting a tough issue not only for the justices but also for President-elect Obama. He could come under great pressure to take a position for or against the blessing conferred by eight liberal lower-court judges on what many voters — and, I would guess, five justices — would see as a raw racial quota.

To be sure, it is far from clear that the Court will take the case, one of dozens scheduled to come before its confidential conference on December 12. Although a dissent by six conservative and moderate Appeals Court judges urged Supreme Court review, the case does not involve the kind of clear split among lower courts that only the high court can resolve. So it may disappear without a trace, with no occasion for Obama or his Justice Department to take a position.

How would soon-to-be-President Obama like it if the courts were to order the Navy — his Navy — to cripple its training in Southern California coastal waters in the use of sonar to detect enemy submarines, and thereby perhaps endanger the Pacific Fleet?

That’s what four Democratic-appointed federal judges in California and two liberal Supreme Court justices voted to do in a recent case, to avoid any possibility of harming marine mammals, not one of which has suffered a documented injury in 40 years of sonar training off the California coast.

And that’s the sort of thing that liberal groups want done by the judges that President-elect Obama will soon be appointing.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court overturned on November 12, in Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the major restrictions on sonar training that the four lower-court judges had ordered. The majority held that with the nation embroiled in two wars, "the Navy’s interest in effective, realistic training of its sailors" far outweighed the speculative harm that the training might do to the plaintiffs’ interest in marine mammals.

"For the plaintiffs, the most serious possible injury would be harm to an unknown number of the marine mammals that they study and observe," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for himself and the four other more-conservative justices. "In contrast, forcing the Navy to deploy an inadequately trained antisubmarine force jeopardizes the safety of the fleet."

President Bush, his Securities and Exchange Commission appointees, other free-enterprise dogmatists who have stood in the way of regulating risky and opaque financial manipulations, and greedy Wall Streeters deserve the blame heaped on them for the financial meltdown that has so severely shaken America.

But the pretense of many Democrats that this crisis is altogether a Republican creation is simplistic and dangerous.

It is simplistic because Democrats have been a big part of the problem, in part by supporting governmental distortions of the marketplace through mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose reckless lending practices necessitated a $200 billion government rescue last month. It is dangerous because misdiagnosing the causes of the crisis could lead both to regulatory overkill and to more reckless risk taking by Fannie, Freddie, or newly created government-sponsored enterprises.

Fannie and Freddie aside, it’s worth pointing out that many, if not most, of those greedy Wall Street barons are Democrats. And that the securities and investment industry has given more money to Democrats than to Republicans in this election cycle. And that opposing regulation of risky new financial practices by private investment banks and others has been a bipartisan enterprise, engaged in by the Clinton and Bush administrations alike.

The Supreme Court has five liberal judicial activists.

It also has five conservative judicial activists.

By "judicial activism," I mean a willingness to aggrandize judicial power by striking down democratically adopted laws and policies, based on subjective value judgments with no clear basis in the Constitution’s text or history.

(Do I miscount? No. Justice Anthony Kennedy is liberal sometimes, conservative sometimes, and activist almost all of the time.)

The activist bent of all nine justices is illustrated by the aftermath of two of this year’s biggest decisions.

In the first, on June 25, a 5-4 liberal majority (including Kennedy) stretched constitutional interpretation past the breaking point to bar Louisiana and other states from punishing by death even the most vicious rapes of children. The Louisiana rape victim was an 8-year-old girl.

In the second decision, issued the next day, a 5-4 conservative majority (also including Kennedy) struck down the District of Columbia’s strict gun control law by holding for the first time that the hopelessly ambiguous, 217-year-old Second Amendment protects a broad individual right to "keep and bear arms."

The child-rape case is now back before the Court in the form of a rare petition for rehearing by the Louisiana district attorney who was on the losing end of the June 25 decision. Based on a glaring error in the majority opinion, the petition will be on the table at the justices’ private conference on September 29.