To the list of issues in this year’s presidential campaign – the economy, the Iraq misadventure, health care and energy – there’s an added starter shaping up: control of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The makeup of the court is an implicit issue every presidential year but rarely gets the attention it deserves. The public’s up on things it can experience personally, such as inflation, gasoline prices, war and taxes. But the Supremes are a remote bunch. Odds are the average American couldn’t name more than two or three of the justices; scratch that – odds are he or she couldn’t name any.

And that’s a grievous flaw in our prized democracy, for the court has greater long-term impact on life in this country than any Congress and most presidents. Its members serve for life, or as long as they maintain “good behavior,” and its jurisdiction is vast. But this year there’s a chance the high court could be a top priority for the Obama and McCain camps, or at least for their ideological auxiliaries.

The immediate reason is the court’s decision overturning the Bush administration’s detention-without-charge policy for terrorist suspects held at Guantanamo and ruling that they have a habeas corpus right to a hearing before a judge.

The ruling appears to be fairly limited: It does not guarantee detainees a trial in civilian court, merely a right to be told before a federal court why they’re being held. Seems reasonable enough, since some of these guys have been in the pokey for six years and since some, as a series by the McClatchy-Tribune news service discovered, had no connection with terrorism – at least not before they were tossed in with the bad guys in Guantanamo.

The ruling has become fodder for the great national ideological debate that rages over how much in the way of civil liberties – and, equally important, the great ideal of liberty we symbolize – must be sacrificed for the sake of safety.

Barack Obama and John McCain wasted no time throwing rocks at each over the issue. Obama hailed the ruling as ratifying the country’s historic commitment to the rights of the individual, whether a citizen or not. McCain condemned it. The Arizona senator wisely did not adopt Justice Antonin Scalia’s prediction that “more Americans will die” as a result of the ruling – an intemperate and uncalled-for cheap-shot attack on his fellow justices who voted in the majority. Nothing new for angry Antonin.

But McCain made clear that he’ll use Obama’s support for the ruling against him in the fall campaign. “We have a fundamental disagreement about it,” McCain said in a formal statement, “and I will look forward to that debate quite often in the future.”

Neither man made news on the issue. Each played to his political base. And whether their difference will move any voters among the great unwashed remains to be seen. But among those stalwarts on the overheated liberal left and the yahoos on the paranoid right, the Obama-McCain difference is a very big deal and reason enough to make control of the Supreme Court a life-and-death issue.

Each side knows the next president – should he serve two full terms – is likely to remake the high court simply because the justices are an old bunch.

Three of the nine justices – Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Anthony Kennedy – are in their 70s, and John Paul Stevens is 88. Two others, David Souter (68) and Stephen Breyer (69), are not exactly spring chickens either.

In short, this is a court ripe for retirements and new blood.

It’s not considered good form for presidential candidates to make too much of an issue of the court. At least not directly. Both sides are more likely to let outside supporters do the dirty work. To the extent that McCain and Obama tangle publicly on the court and its future, it is likely to be over the detainee decision.

It’s a fertile issue. Lots of ground for lofty (and not-so-lofty) legal debate. The high court left much unsaid in its decision, such as where the detainees would be charged and tried and whether the military commissions, which President Bush and Congress created to handle the matter, pass constitutional muster.

We’re in uncharted waters here, a conflict without precedent, unaddressed by the rules of war between sovereign states, the Geneva Conventions or American criminal law.

Each side will bring the wisdom of the sages to the argument. Conservatives like the advice of the late Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson that the Constitution, for all its reverence for individual rights, “is not a suicide pact.” I like that one.

Liberals hark back to one of the founders, Benjamin Franklin, who warned that “those who would give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” I like that one, too.

Tough choice, when you think about it.

John Farmer is national political correspondent for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. E-mail [email protected].