Yesterday's ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, holding that the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional, has sparked widespread outrage. Average Americans are upset. Republican politicians are upset. Democrat politicians are upset. And Senator Robert Byrd has urged the Senate to do something to throw "back in the face of this stupid judge."

The three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit was faced with a lawsuit by an atheist father who was upset with the daily recitation of the Pledge in his daughter's school. He wasn't upset about her having to recite it, and thanks to a war-era Supreme Court decision, she didn't have to. He sued because she watched and listened while her classmates - who had no objections to the Pledge of Allegiance -- recited the words "one nation, under God."

It's a truly outrageous ruling. Outrageous, but not a complete surprise. After all, this is the sort of thing you get from activist judges.

The Ninth Circuit is justly known as the most judicially activist court in the nation, and it has earned a fair amount of criticism for its actions. Chief Justice William Rehnquist commented a few years ago that "some panels of the Ninth Circuit have a hard time saying no to any litigant with a hard-luck story," and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once felt compelled to remind its members that in litigation, "courts characteristically pause to ask: is this conflict really necessary?"

During the Supreme Court's 1997-1998 term, 28 of the Court's 80 cases were appeals from the Ninth Circuit. Twenty-seven of those 28 Ninth Circuit decisions were reversed - 17 of them unanimously. The year before, the Court reversed 73 percent of the Ninth Circuit cases it took.

Judge Stephen Reinhardt, one of the two judges who voted to rule the Pledge unconstitutional, makes no secret of his judicial philosophy. Writing for the majority in Compassion in Dying v. Washington, Reinhardt declared in -- reference to Constitutional interpretation -- that "we must strive to resist the natural judicial impulse to limit our vision to that which can plainly be observed on the face of the document before us."

Is it really so shocking that judicial activists will come up with incredible ways to twist what the Constitution actually says? I wonder what this panel would have ruled if the school had required that the Declaration of Independence be read aloud every morning? Is reading that hallowed document, with its references to "nature's God" and a "Creator" who endows us with unalienable rights, unconstitutional as well?

The lesson that Americans should take from this is that we need judges who are not merely fair and qualified. We need judges who will follow the law, not their own ideas of what the law would be if they had free rein to rewrite it.

We're facing a vacancy crisis in the judiciary today. Eighty-nine seats are vacant with 49 nominees waiting to fill them. Some of them have been waiting more than a year, and some of them - like Dennis Shedd, whose hearing is scheduled for this afternoon - are under attack because they were appointed by a President who believes that "the role of a judge is to interpret the law, not to legislate from the bench."

As we hope that this decision is reversed, either by the Ninth Circuit en banc or the Supreme Court, we should also hope that those Senators who place more weight on a nominee's personal views than his willingness to set them aside will wake up and get their priorities straight.

In the meantime, God bless America.

John Nowacki is Director of Legal Policy at the Free Congress Foundation.

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