Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, a Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, warned in a speech to the Faith and Freedom Coalition's Road to Majority conference today that "the courts are at risk" in the upcoming presidential election, lamenting that at least one current Supreme Court justice displays a "secular mindset."

Sessions said that as the committee's ranking member during the confirmation hearings of Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, "I felt, like so many of you, the court hasn't been performing in a way we like it to."

He repeated a criticism of Sotomayor that conservatives had leveled at her during her confirmation hearings, expressing dismay that she had approvingly quoted legal scholar Martha Minow's observation that in the law "there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives — no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging," an acknowledgment of the hidden assumptions and biases that all judges bring to the law.

Sessions said the quote "still makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck."

"You see, this is a postmodern, relativistic, secular mindset and I believe it's directly contrary to the founding of our republic," he said.

"So I really think this whole court system is really important," he added later in the speech, "and the real value and battle that we're engaged in here is one to reaffirm that there is objective truth, it's not all relative. And that means some things are right and some things are wrong, and we're getting too far away from that in my opinion and it's not healthy for any country and it's really not healthy for a democracy like ours that's built on the rule of law."