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 Counting the votesIf evidence needed that elections matter, Alito's pick proves it
 It's no surprise that President Bush would nominate a conservative judge like Samuel Alito, Bruce Morton says. SPECIAL REPORTYOUR E-MAIL ALERTSWashington (CNN) -- The Senate Judiciary Committee won't vote on Judge Samuel Alito until next week, but it seems pretty clear he will be the next Supreme Court justice and will move the court to the right compared with the woman he's replacing, Sandra Day O'Connor. Well, why not? I don't know whether he'll vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, the decision that legalized a woman's right to an abortion, but I wouldn't be surprised if he did. You wouldn't expect George W. Bush, an anti-abortion president, to appoint some abortion rights advocate to the court, now would you? It is one more reminder, if we needed one, that elections have consequences. Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois Democrat who heads the party's Congressional Campaign Committee, said, "George Bush won the election. If you don't like it, you better win elections." He's got that exactly right. Which reminds me of another man we've all been thinking about this week -- the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Monday was his official day. His actual birthday was Sunday. He would have been 77, and you have to wonder what he'd think of some recent elections and their consequences. Lots of big things happened when King was in the arena. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts passed; legal segregation in the South ended. Blacks got elected to office there. And Southern whites, who'd been the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, became the Republican Party's new base. You could wake up in the morning and hear history being made. A 30ish producer at CNN said the other day he'd like to have been alive then -- all that passion about public issues, the conviction that we all could make a difference. I replied that the '60s had been a slum of a decade -- two Kennedys and a King murdered, American cities in flames, and so on. But I could, remembering all that, also hear Robert Kennedy's voice, quoting playwright George Bernard Shaw: "Some men see things as they are and ask why, but I dream things that never were, and ask why not?" That was the last line of the standard speech; when you heard it, you headed for the press bus. So in spite of all the violence, those were exciting years. Some big changes got made; others didn't. It's been a quieter time since, more sense of the country just drifting along. And this is not a good thing. While we drifted, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. This administration believes in tax cuts for the wealthy -- another reminder that elections have consequences. Education, we used to think, would help bridge the gap between rich and poor, but that hasn't happened. Reading and math scores are down in many inner-city schools, and the truth is, of course, that if you don't get a good education, a lot of the good jobs in this information age will be closed to you. So you look around at the growing gap between rich and poor, the growing difference between what CEOs make and average employees make, the sprawl, the McMansions, and you wonder if there isn't something out there that might bring back some of the 1960s concern for the public good, for the general welfare, for making it better for most of us. And you find yourself thinking, hey, maybe there is. What is it? Greed. People may look at the Enron execs and their corporate cousins, the lobbyists and the congressmen enjoying golf trips to exotic places -- never mind the poor folks -- and just get mad, old-fashioned angry, and decide, hey, let's throw the bums out and start over. That would mean getting rid of incumbents -- always difficult, especially in the House where they've tried to draw safe districts for each other. Difficult, but not impossible. Get enough angry people voting this fall, and some of the bums might lose their jobs and some idealists who want to fix things and not just hustle pork, might win, might make some big changes, the way the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Congresses did. Every once in a while you get an election like that -- 1994 was the last one -- and who knows? It could just happen again. Though, I have to add, don't bet the rent on it. 
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