The Heritage Foundation - Leadership for America

Here’s a preview of the week ahead in Washington.

The liberals continue to block President Bush’s conservative judicial nominees in the hope they can pack the courts with liberal judges in a potential Democrat administration. The federal courts are important because they are the training ground for our future Supreme Court nominees. Conservatives need to make sure that the table is not set for judges that will legislate a so-called constitutional right of same-sex marriage, take away the right to keep and bear arms and strike down any mention of God in the public square.

The Heritage Foundation will host an event, “The UN Human Rights Council: Reform or Regression?” this Friday, May 2 at 10 a.m. The U.N. General Assembly voted in March 2006 to replace the Commission on Human Rights with the Human Rights Council because the commission, dominated by human rights abusers who used their influence to block scrutiny or criticism, proved unable to champion human rights. The new council is just like the old one and has focused on criticizing Israel yet ignores the abuses in Communist China and Dictator Kim Jung Il’s North Korea.

Steven Groves, analyst for the Freedom Project at Heritage’s Margaret Thatcher Center, has written about the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. This left-wing international entity issued a report requesting the United States stop the death penalty, restore the rights of convicted felons to vote and ban first amendment protected communications the left considers hate speech.