You may not have realized that the Supreme Court-even after a decade under Chief Justice William Rehnquist-is a liberal "judicial dictatorship" that "has centralized control over every moral, political, social, and economic issue in the country," as part of an "intellectual elite that believes the prevailing social order of middle-class America is deeply flawed, unjust, and irrational."

That’s what Patrick Buchanan has been telling Republican audiences as he campaigns for the presidential nomination. He’s also been asserting that the chief "beneficiaries of the Court’s protection" are "members of various minorities including criminals, atheists, homosexuals, flag burners, illegal immigrants (including terrorists), convicts, and pornographers."

And Republican true believers seem to lap it up, as did those assembled at the Heritage Foundation, in Washington, D.C., for the Jan. 29 Buchanan speech quoted above.

Not to be completely outdone in court-bashing, faltering front-runner Sen. Robert Dole (R-Kan.) declared in his Jan. 23 response to President Bill Clinton’s State of the Union address that "our liberal courts" are "[at] war with our values," so that we must (yet again!) "untie the hands of our police."

Who is he talking about? Sandra Day O’Connor?

Never mind that Republican presidents appointed nearly two-thirds of all 790 federal judges, including seven of the nine Supreme Court justices. Republican presidential aspirants are once again running against the courts, as they have done ever since Richard Nixon’s campaign in the 1968 election.

But this time, there’s a difference. This time, the Republicans might end up with the power to do something to the courts, beyond just packing them with conservative judges. That’s because they have a real chance of winning both houses of Congress and the presidency-an event that last occurred in 1952, when Republicans were a kinder and gentler bunch. (I liked Ike.)

One question presented by this scenario is whether an all-Republican government would go after the courts in a way that could do lasting damage not only to our constitutional jurisprudence, but also to the stability of our institutions.

Buchanan has some suggestions for where to start:

• "One we could appoint judges for a term of years rather than for life. The term could be renewed, if the president and Senate think they have done a good job."

• "Second, federal judges at the appellate and district court level could be made subject to voter recall and removal."

• "Third, Congress could use its power, granted in the Constitution, to restrict the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court."

And so on.

Is Buchanan’s court-bashing just harmless right-wing bombast from a candidate likely to remain stuck in the Republican pack? Is it too extreme to catch on?

Perhaps, Surely some of Buchanan’s salvos seem too off-the-wall, too internally inconsistent, and too riddled with inaccuracies to capture broad national support.

For example, he waxes indignant that "the Court orders that taxpayers must provide lawyers for criminal defendants who cannot afford to pay for one." What would Buchanan have the Court do? Simply throw defendants into prison after kangaroo trials without assistance of counsel? Is there a big constituency out there for overruling Gideon v Wainwright (1963)?

Buchanan also says the states should bypass Congress in proposing constitutional amendments because "Congress… naturally protects the Court because the Court is the source of most of its powers."

Huh? The implication seems to be that Congress is getting away with exceeding its constitutional powers because the Court is not striking down enough of its enactments. So Buchanan wants the Court to void more of the laws adopted, through the majoritarian process, by the elected representatives of the people-this in the same speech in which Buchanan savages the Court for "active opposition to the wishes of the majority"!

Buchanan also claims that "a consent decree in South Carolina requires the state to provide a recreational program for convicts, including tournaments in croquet, badminton, paddle-ball, and backgammon." It’s a lovely image, but no such consent decree exists.

Buchanan’s exercises in rhetorical silliness should not, however, obscure the danger that his brand of incendiary court-bashing could start a prairie fire. Millions of Republican primary voters are still seething (as is Buchanan) over the Supreme Court’s decades-old decisions banning state-sponsored school prayer, legalizing abortion, and ordering desegregation through busing-and over its 1995 decision striking down all state laws setting term limits for members of Congress.

And there are still enough mush-headed liberal judges around to give a patina of plausibility to Buchananite court-bashing. You can bet that the Republicans will tar President Clinton with an already infamous decision on Jan. 24 by Judge Harold Baer Jr., of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, to let off a drag dealer by excluding 79 pounds of cocaine and heroin from evidence.

Judge Baer held that plainclothes police officers did not have a "reasonable suspicion" of drug activity when-while hanging out at 5 a.m. on a New York City street known for interstate drug deals-they saw four men approach the defendant’s double-parked car (with Michigan plates), open the trunk without speaking to the driver, dump two duffel bags in the back, shut the door, and run away when they spotted the officers. "[H]ad the men not run when the cops began to stare at them," explained the judge, "it would have been unusual" because "residents in this neighborhood tended to regard police officers as corrupt, abusive, and violent."

Judge Baer is right to be concerned about police misconduct. But his blunderbuss approach and his choice of such an inappropriate case in which to vent his suspicions may catapult the Clinton-appointed judge (chosen by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.)) to stardom as this year’s Willie Horton.

In any event, Dole and other seekers of the Republican presidential nomination may be powerfully tempted to cater to the hard right by competing with Buchanan in court-bashing, and in proposals to strip federal courts of power over matters like school prayer and abortion.

If such proposals are written into the Republican platform, and if Republicans win control of the presidency and Congress this November, what’s to stop them from gratifying their long-frustrated social-issues constituency by letting them have their way with the courts and the Constitution?

The greatest danger might be a replay-with greater prospects of success-of the efforts by Republicans like Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) in the early 1980s to bypass the cumbersome constitutional amendment process by statutorily stripping federal courts of jurisdiction to enforce the Supreme Court’s precedents on school prayer, abortion, school desegregation, the exclusionary rule, and anything else at the top of the social-issues agenda.

At one point in 1982, more than 30 such proposals were pending in Congress. The House passed a bill to strip lower federal courts of jurisdiction to order busing, and a proposal to block even the Supreme Court from enforcing its school prayer decisions won 48 votes in the Senate.

Ultimately, these court-stripping efforts fell short because of opposition from most moderates in Congress, as well as from people like Barry Goldwater, the original "Mr. Conservative," who might be counted a moderate on today’s ideological spectrum. They realized that the jurisdiction-stripping device had the potential not merely to clip the Court’s wings but to devour its essential power to check legislative and executive excesses.

Now both House and Senate are Republican, and disheartened moderates are retiring in droves. Depending on the election results, the next Congress could be a pretty radical place-radical enough, perhaps, to pass the sorts of court-stripping statutes or to propose the sorts of constitutional amendments that have always failed in the past.

On the other hand, perhaps the Republicans would be content merely to pack the courts with true-blue conservatives. There would be no more nominees in the mold of Reagan-appointed Justices O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, both moderate conservatives. They were chosen in part because of their acceptability to the Democrats, who then controlled the Senate. But with a conservative Republican Senate, it’s possible that even Robert Bork might not be sufficiently reliable to pass the litmus test: Back in the early 1980s, Bork criticized as unwise and perhaps unconstitutional the same kind of jurisdiction-stripping legislation that Buchanan is touting today.

An all-Republican government would be looking, as presidential candidate Steve Forbes recently indicated, to pack the Supreme Court with clones of Justice Antonin Scalia. And with two or three more Scalian justices, the conservative Republican social agenda could be written into law by the Court itself.