Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, October 3, 1994                   TAG: 9410040027
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-3   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

HIGH COURT FACES POLITICAL DOCKET

Of overriding significance in the term, the justices, with Stephen Breyer in the freshman chair, will decide whether it is constitutional for states - many of them gripped by anti-incumbency fever - to impose limits on the number of terms their U.S. senators and House members may serve. Legal scholars, impressed by a line of reasoning tracing some ballot restrictions to colonial times, have backed off earlier predictions of an easy win for opponents of term limits.

The court also will decide whether states may ban anonymously distributed campaign leaflets and, separately, whether the makeup of the Federal Election Commission is constitutional.

The justices will resolve a free-speech challenge to a ban on federal workers' honoraria that Congress adopted in a 1989 ethics law. On other politically charged topics, the court will decide whether Congress can ban guns at local schools, give preferences to minority contractors or punish someone for selling child pornography when the seller may not know that the performer in the video was under 18.

``The court historically has made the crucial decisions pertaining to elections,'' said Thomas Mann, director of governmental studies at the Brookings Institution, surveying the upcoming cases and recalling, for example, the 1963 decision requiring political equality through ``one person, one vote.''

Many legal experts think the term limits case, arising from a 1992 Arkansas vote, will be this session's blockbuster. It could force dozens of veteran lawmakers from office. ``Even if the court rules against states' efforts on term limits,'' Mann said, ``all of the money that has gone into the lobbying [for state referendums] will now go toward working on'' a Constitutional amendment.

Voting rights and disputes over zig-zagging black-majority districts also could be back in the new term. Lower federal courts disagree over how to interpret a 1993 Supreme Court decision that allowed challenges by white voters to ``bizarre''-looking districts.