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tutional based on the Constitution, not based on whether they liked the values that the framers put in the Constitution.
In any case, I thought, the Court must already see the danger and the harm caused by this sort of law. Why else would they grant review? There was no reason to hear the case in the Supreme Court if they weren't convinced that this regulation was harmful. So in my view, we didn't need to persuade them that this law was bad, we needed to show why it was unconstitutional.
There was one way, however, in which I felt politics would matter and in which I thought a response was appropriate. I was convinced that the Court would not hear our arguments if it thought these were just the arguments of a group of lefty loons. This Supreme Court was not about to launch into a new field of judicial review if it seemed that this field of review was simply the preference of a small political minority. Although my focus in the case was not to demonstrate how bad the Sonny Bono Act was but to demonstrate that it was unconstitutional, my hope was to make this argument against a background of briefs that covered the full range of political views. To show that this claim against the CTEA was grounded in law and not politics, then, we tried to gather the widest range of credible critics--credible not because they were rich and famous, but because they, in the aggregate, demonstrated that this law was unconstitutional regardless of one's politics.
The first step happened all by itself. Phyllis Schlafly's organization, Eagle Forum, had been an opponent of the CTEA from the very beginning. Mrs. Schlafly viewed the CTEA as a sellout by Congress. In November 1998, she wrote a stinging editorial attacking the Republican Congress for allowing the law to pass. As she wrote, "Do you sometimes wonder why bills that create a financial windfall to narrow special interests slide easily through the intricate legislative process, while bills that benefit the general public seem to get bogged down?" The an
